¶ Pythagoras (1)
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Index Entry
Pythagoras:
"We come then to Greece and the earliest of the going from just geometry into numbers and arithmetic and we get to our friend Pythagoras. Pythagoras was a very unknown kind of a character, he’s quite a mystical one; he’s almost like one of the prophets. The Pythagoreans kept things secret. Pythagoras taught us many things about the second powers of numbers. He was the first to discover the arithmetical second powering and third powering. All the integration of the arithmetic with the geometry comes from Pythagoras.
"And we have Pythagoras… having experimentally tried twanging a string, what you might call a stringed instrument and finding that when it had a flat at half the length of the prime string it brought about a change in notes which we today would call on the √?√ scale, exactly one octave. This is a Pythagorean discovery; and a man who was terribly interested in fundamental rates of change of number, by various operations of the numbers, one with the other, and all the powering.
“We have him also then thirding the end of the string and discovering that this took the tone what we call ‘down,’”
¶ Citations
- tape transcript, RBF to EJA, chez Wolf, 18 Jun’71
