Pythagoras, whose identity is as mysterious as Shakespeare’s, his persona as adrift in the lacuna between myth and truth, set into motion the golden age of mathematics with the development of numerical logic—the foundation of mathematical physics. His ideas went on to influence Plato, Copernicus, Descartes, Kepler, Newton, and Einstein. To Pythagoras, numbers were more than tools for counting and computing. He studied their properties and relational patterns, seeking to extract from them some larger revelation about the nature of reality, the way a poet uses words not merely to denote and
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