“Pythagoras had the insight to apply a mathematical description to worldly phenomena like music. According to legend, he noticed similarities between the sound of plucking a lyre string and the resonances made by hammering a metal bar.
He found that they created musical frequencies that vibrated with certain ratios. So something as aesthetically pleasing as music has its origin in the mathematics of resonances. This, he thought, might show that the diversity of the objects we see around us must obey these same mathematical rules.
So at least two great theories of our world emerged from ancient Greece: the idea that everything consists of invisible, indestructible atoms and that the diversity of nature can be described by the mathematics of vibrations.”