This Cult Worshipped 9th Grade Math

They don’t make mathematicians like they used to. This is the legacy of Pythagoras today, A squared plus B squared equals C squared, geometry for eighth graders. Big Classroom would have you believe that’s all he ever was, the triangle guy. But once upon a time Pythagoras might have been the most revered of all the Greek philosophers – more than Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle! Far from just the triangle guy, Pythagoras started an entire math cult that made beans illegal, led a war, and ended in fire.

[enoughothis]

Pythagoras hated beans. He thought that farting released the breath of life from your body.

[state_song_xprt]

Pythagoras did basically everything except invent the theorem that bears his name, which had been well-known for over a thousand years.
It's like if we gave Einstein credit for inventing the counterweight trebuchet.

[BurneraccountXD]

I still remember all the way back in my calculus class how my professor told us how Pythagoras had a cúlt, and how when one of his followers proved that something said cúlt believed was wrong, they were subsequently put in a small boat with no oars, and his followers sent that person drifting off to sea as a form of execütion.

[svijetlanradov]

I remember reading Plutarch and he claimed that Pythagoras' advice to abstain from beans actually meant to abstain from politics, because many Greek city-states used beans to vote.

It was somewhere in Plutarch's Moralia, but maybe I just dreamt that.

[otheirony]

“Math’s first cult leader”

Wait, there were other math cult leaders?

[jonathanwebster]

Pythagoras: "I don't know the solution to this problem; but I can't help thinking the answer somehow involves triangles"

[cremonkey]

I really like the story about Pythagoras showing everyone at the Olympic games his golden thigh, to prove he's the Hyperborean Apollo.

[christopherg]

6:08 I heard that humans created lemons by crossing two plants.
Life didn't give us lemons - we made them ourself!

[The_Libationist]

I always knew about Pythagoras’ purported death as a consequence of refusing to cross a bean field but never knew that it was because he believed they contained the souls of the dead.

[godlaydying]

It seems plausible to me that Pythagoras didn't really discover his theorem, and that it was just ascribed to him because he was known as 'the numbers guy'.

[BlackSwordMeister]

Suddenly that weird assassin cult from Reign: The Conqueror seems like one of the less weird things from that anime...

[Ring]

My favorite fact about Pythagoras is he claimed his past lives were nobodies.

[Wyattinous]

Pythagoras being Australian only makes him go harder as a historical figure 🏛️🔺🇦🇺

[OrphicPolytheist]

Pythagoras's musical discovery was the octave. Before Pythagoras they only knew of 5 musical notes, and Pythagoras discovered another 2, giving us a total of 7 basic music notes, known as an octave.

[AmberLorenz-dl]

It's crazy. Every time I want to learn more about a subject, Jack releases a video for it.

[safebox]

"He didn't invent music."
It's worth noting that he also didn't invent his namesake theorem of a^2 + b^2 = c^2.
It's around 2000 years older than Pythagoras himself and he might not even have known about it because the earliest written text we have on it from ancient Greece came from Euclid some 200 years later in the form of a different proof.

[thomasrinschler]

No mention of how Milo (2:52) supposedly died? Since he was the champion at wrestling at five consecutive Olympic Games, he had the reputation as being the strongest man alive. When he met a farmer trying to split a stump with wedges, he said he could split it with his own bare hands. The farmer said to go at it, and left to get lunch. Milo put his hand into where the wedges were splitting the stump, but the wedges came out and his hand got trapped, and he wasn't quite strong enough to pull the stump apart. Before the farmer came back, he was attacked and killed by wolves or a lion.

[theelectro]

She be triangulating on my Pythagoras tell’ I theorem

[kaip]

The best part about this all is that Pythagoras didn't even come up with his namesake theorem. The concept was known for thousands of years before his time, he was just the most vocal cult leader to speak about the subject.

[twotothehalf]

Wasn't it in his cult that someone was killed for discovering that √2 is irrational, which goes against the universal harmony of rational numbers or something?