Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Outer Space »

Kitty Ferguson is the author of Tycho & Kepler, Measuring the Universe, The Fire in the Equations, and Stephen Hawking: Quest for a Theory of Everything. She is also a Juilliard-trained professional musician, and lives in New Jersey.

The enthralling story of Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, whose insights transformed the ancient world and still inspire the realms of science, mathematics, philosophy, and the arts.

"Pythagoras's influence on the ideas, and therefore on the destiny, of the human race was probably greater than that of any single man before or after him," wrote Arthur Koestler. Though most people know of him only for the famous Pythagorean Theorem (a2 +b2=c2), in fact the pillars of our scientific tradition—belief that the universe is rational, that there is unity to all things, and that numbers and mathematics are a powerful guide to truth about nature and the cosmos—hark back to the convictions of this legendary sixth-century B.C. scholar.

Born around 570 B.C. on the cultured Aegean island of Samos, Pythagoras (according to ancient tales) studied with the sage Thales nearby at Miletus, and with priests and scribes in Egypt and Babylon. Eventually he founded his own school at Croton in southern Italy, where he and his followers began to unravel the surprising deep truths concealed behind such ordinary tasks as tuning a lyre. While considering why some string lengths produced beautiful sounds and others discordant ones, they uncovered the ratios of musical harmony, and recognized that hidden behind the confusion and complexity of nature are patterns and orderly relationships. They had surprised the Creator at his drafting board and had glimpsed the mind of God! Some of them later would also find something darker in numbers and nature: irrationality, a revelation so unsettling and subversive that it may have contributed to the destruction of their brotherhood.

Praised for her ability to illuminate complex subjects, Kitty Ferguson brilliantly evokes the archaic world of Pythagoras, showing how ideas spread in antiquity, chronicling the influence he and his followers have had on so many extraordinary people in the history of Western thought and science, and bringing a poignant human saga to readers who are daily reminded that harmony and chaos can and do coexist.

Publishers Weekly

The task Ferguson (Tycho & Kepler) takes on is formidable: to describe not only the ancient Greek mathematician and mystic Pythagoras, but also the entire sweep of the Pythagorean legacy, from his time to ours. Even if the book's subtitle is never quite justified, she has largely succeeded. This chatty and readable account bites off great chunks of history and science, from Platonists to string theory. No matter how engaging, however, the book still reads more like a series of facts than a coherent narrative. Best when she comes on like a good friend bursting with some amazing thing she can't wait to share (the passages on Bertrand Russell are particularly sharp and funny), Ferguson has a tendency to punt when a concept becomes difficult to explain; rather than delve into a piece of ancient geometry called the Delian problem, she says, "[a] lengthy text is needed to understand it." Ferguson concludes with banal generalizations about faith versus science. Still, the book is winning, accessible and intermittently fascinating. B&w illus. (Apr.)

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Acknowledgments     ix
Lifetimes and Other Significant Dates     xi
Sixth Century b.c.
"At the hinge of legend and history"     3
The Long-haired Samian     10
"Entirely different from the institutions of the Greeks"     19
"Among them was a man of immense knowledge"     33
"My true race is of Heaven"     49
"All things known have number"     62
"The Famous Figure of Pythagoras"     76
Fifth Century b.c.-Seventh Century a.d.
A Book by Philolaus the Pythagorean     97
Plato's Search for Pythagoras     115
"The ancients, our superiors, who dwelt nearer to the gods, have passed this word on to us"     129
From Aristotle to Euclid     147
The Roman Pythagoras     163
Through Neo-Pythagorean and Ptolemaic Eyes     181
The Wrap-up of Antiquity     197
Eighth-Twenty-first Centuries a.d.
"Dwarfs on the shoulders of giants": Pythagoras in the Middle Ages     215
"Wherein Nature shows herself most excellent and complete"     232
"While the morning stars sang together": Johannes Kepler     250
Enlightened and Illuminated     276
Janus Face     297
The Labyrinths of Simplicity     313
Epilogue: Music or Silence     327
Appendix     329
Notes     331
Bibliography     347
Index     355