Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos in the eastern Aegean, located between Miletus and Athens. Around the age of 30, he moved to Croton in southern Italy, where he established a community of followers. The community grew and acquired political importance in the region. As a consequence of this, after about 20 years, there was an uprising against the Pythagoreans. Pythagoras wrote nothing, but his later followers wrote much, attributing to him many views. It is from his followers that we have the picture of Pythagoras as a brilliant mathematician, who invented the theorem that, in any right-angled triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the square of the other two sides. He was portrayed as applying his mathematics to music and astronomy and, thereby, developing a metaphysical system based on numbers. However, it is difficult to define exactly what Pythagoras himself thought because the later Pythagorean schools tend to attribute to the master their own teachings. By the fourth century A.D., Pythagoras was considered the greatest of all philosophers, eclipsing even Plato and Aristotle because of his influence on both of these thinkers. Pythagoras had an especially important influence on Plato.
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