Math's First Cult Leader | The Life & Times of Pythagoras

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Ай бұрын

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They don’t make mathematicians like they used to. This is the legacy of Pythagoras today, A squared plus B squared equals C squared, geometry for eighth graders. Big Classroom would have you believe that’s all he ever was, the triangle guy. But once upon a time Pythagoras might have been the most revered of all the Greek philosophers - more than Socrates, Plato, or Aristotle! Far from just the triangle guy, Pythagoras started an entire math cult that made beans illegal, led a war, and ended in fire.

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@JackRackam Ай бұрын

Thanks to Keeps for sponsoring this video & for the free product! Head to keeps.com/jackrackam to get a special offer. Individual results may vary

@danielsantiagourtado3430 Ай бұрын

Hey Jack! HUGE fan

@mrmr446 Ай бұрын

He also inspired some parts of Islamic philosophy I think let's talk religion has done an episode on him.

@brokenbridge6316 Ай бұрын

Your video's are good one's Jack. When listening to this I thought about the character Pythagoras from the video game Assassin's Creed: Odyssey.

@michaelrae9599 Ай бұрын

Also (eventually) THE reason why Christianity bans abortion. Originally, Neo-Pythagorists recognized that there were more people who had died than were currently alive. So, where did the extra souls go? Reincarnated over and over to the current time. So, abortion bans are because of Reincarnation. True story

@enoughothis Ай бұрын

Pythagoras hated beans. He thought that farting released the breath of life from your body.

@victorconway444 Ай бұрын

This is the profound intellect that the modern decadent world has turned its back on! Now the west has succumbed to the degeneracy of baked beans and burritos! Well they'll all be sorry they didn't listen to the timeless words of the classics when they suffocate from excessive flatulence!

@OsirisLord Ай бұрын

He's a great example of how you can be smart at one thing and dumb at everything else.

@anonymoose9315 Ай бұрын

If he was right, I’d be dead ten times over now.

@svijetlanradov8235 Ай бұрын

I remember reading Plutarch and he claimed that Pythagoras' advice to abstain from beans actually meant to abstain from politics, because many Greek city-states used beans to vote. It was somewhere in Plutarch's Moralia, but maybe I just dreamt that.

@ArcherMcdonald Ай бұрын

I can’t remember where but his “evidence” was that it stepped on a bean once and it smelled like sperm so we evolved from beans

@joshuaevans6295 Ай бұрын

Pythagoras did basically everything except invent the theorem that bears his name, which had been well-known for over a thousand years. It's like if we gave Einstein credit for inventing the counterweight trebuchet.

@ForelliBoy Ай бұрын

Or giving Pascal credit for the "triangle"

@SpoopySquid Ай бұрын

Einstein: Well have you heard about my Theory of Relativity? Rando: What's that? Einstein: It's my theory that massive siege engines are relatively kick-ass

@ChamonixHouse884 Ай бұрын

@@SpoopySquiddamn that was good

@Hwje1111 Ай бұрын

And if he invented a cult that proclaimed him as the messiah and banned cheese

@Whiskers4169 3 күн бұрын

What do you mean ? You never heard of the Einsteins theory of siege ?

@otheirony618 Ай бұрын

“Math’s first cult leader” Wait, there were other math cult leaders?

@victorconway444 Ай бұрын

numerology

@DeptalJexus Ай бұрын

today's math cult would be AI algorithms.

@lyokianhitchhiker Ай бұрын

Statistics.

@DISTurbedwaffle918 Ай бұрын

Economists.

@mathdhut3603 Ай бұрын

Timecube.

@BurneraccountXD69 Ай бұрын

I still remember all the way back in my calculus class how my professor told us how Pythagoras had a cúlt, and how when one of his followers proved that something said cúlt believed was wrong, they were subsequently put in a small boat with no oars, and his followers sent that person drifting off to sea as a form of execütion.

@user-ht1vg5we2p Ай бұрын

Yes, they believed all numbers could be expresed as ratios between two integers, (aka believed all numbers to be rational), but this student was the one who first found out the proof that the square root of two is, as we would call it today, irrational (it can never be expressed as a fraction with an integer numerator and an integer denominator), they executed him to avoid leakage of the proof to more people

@davidbuckley2435 Ай бұрын

Yep, supposedly he demonstrated the existence of surds (irrational numbers) by asking Pythagoras, if a(squared)=1, and b(squared)=1, then c(squared)=2. So what's the length of the hypotenuse? Pythagoras couldn't work out the square root of 2, since it has an infinite number of decimal places (like pi). This went against Pythagoras' doctrine that "all phenomena in the universe can be reduced to whole numbers and their ratios." The mathematician in this story is often ascribed to be Hippasus of Metapontum, but since he probably lived nearly a century after Pythagoras, it's unlikely that he posed this problem to Pythagoras, but rather to some other Pythagorean disciples. Alternatively, the whole story could simply be bunk, but that's not nearly as much fun, is it? The other wrinkle in the story is that the existence of irrational numbers was probably proved prior to Hippasus' life, so I personally treat this entire story with a healthy dose of skepticism.

@BJGvideos Ай бұрын

Why are you using random accent marks?

@BurneraccountXD69 Ай бұрын

@@BJGvideos Because I used words that "Google's video website" does not like.

@BurneraccountXD69 Ай бұрын

@@BJGvideos try typing the same exact thing without them and see what happens.

@joshuacarre06 Ай бұрын

Pythagorian lore goes HARD

@notimportant2605 Ай бұрын

You know what else goes hard? That's right! Triangles B)

@changingpeopleslivesmoon2993 Ай бұрын

Just like yours

@notimportant2605 Ай бұрын

Are you saying that my triangles brings all the beans to the yard?

@DeptalJexus Ай бұрын

do they still hate beans?

@purplepedantry Ай бұрын

That's a high compliment from the main villain of a franchise known for being complicated as Final Fantasy² * Kingdom Hearts ÷ The Lord of the Rings.

@jonathanwebster7091 Ай бұрын

Pythagoras: "I don't know the solution to this problem; but I can't help thinking the answer somehow involves triangles"

@svijetlanradov8235 Ай бұрын

@heiskanbuscadordelaverdad8709 Ай бұрын

Source: it was revealed to me in a dream

@SpoopySquid Ай бұрын

@@heiskanbuscadordelaverdad8709very fitting, given the subject matter

@Wyattinous Ай бұрын

Pythagoras being Australian only makes him go harder as a historical figure 🏛️🔺🇦🇺

@aussietom85 Ай бұрын

Be better if they gave him the Melbourne greek accent

@TheShadowChesireCat Ай бұрын

What? I heard his accent, and those it was a try at The Beatles's Scouse, to fit the hippy aesthetic.

@joshcrapper864 Ай бұрын

@@TheShadowChesireCatI'd say Mick Jagger

@cremonkey4301 Ай бұрын

I really like the story about Pythagoras showing everyone at the Olympic games his golden thigh, to prove he's the Hyperborean Apollo.

@luciandonohue1159 Ай бұрын

Pythagoras: Math's first madlad.

@shinsenshogun900 Ай бұрын

The one and only Mathlad

@The_Libationist Ай бұрын

I always knew about Pythagoras’ purported death as a consequence of refusing to cross a bean field but never knew that it was because he believed they contained the souls of the dead.

@1Ring42 Ай бұрын

My favorite fact about Pythagoras is he claimed his past lives were nobodies.

@goodlookingcorpse Ай бұрын

It seems plausible to me that Pythagoras didn't really discover his theorem, and that it was just ascribed to him because he was known as 'the numbers guy'.

@comettamer Ай бұрын

Supposedly, the theory in question had been well known for like, a thousand years by that point.

@joshuaevans6295 Ай бұрын

There's records showing it was well understood by the Babylonians 1000 years earlier

@alternateperson6600 22 күн бұрын

It's ascribed to him because the first known proof was given by someone from his cult. Earlier civilizations were aware of the equation, but had no proof.

@BlackSwordMeister Ай бұрын

Suddenly that weird assassin cult from Reign: The Conqueror seems like one of the less weird things from that anime...

@Dystopia1111 Ай бұрын

Reign was my 1st introduction to Diogenes and his concept of 'the universe in a barrel'.

@theelectro6812 Ай бұрын

She be triangulating on my Pythagoras tell’ I theorem

@notimportant2605 Ай бұрын

Oh my math! He's back!

@christopherg2347 Ай бұрын

6:08 I heard that humans created lemons by crossing two plants. Life didn't give us lemons - we made them ourself!

@Volnas97 Ай бұрын

So Pythagoras was a ruler of geometry cult? Didn't know that. I square that pun wasn't on purpose. Also looks like Silon took a page from Cave Johnson's book when it came to lemons.

@Thisguy152 Ай бұрын

Never knew Pythagoras was an Aussie

@ShadowTigerYT Ай бұрын

Math is the best, MATH IS THE BEST THING EVER WE ARE THE BEST NERDS UPRISING

@holstorrsceadus1990 Ай бұрын

Liverpudlian Pythagoras caught me hella off guard. Edit: Intro Pythagoras sounded like a Beatle. Video went hard Aussie maybe?

@prettypic444 Ай бұрын

This is why we make STEM majors take arts and humanities classes, so they don’t completely squirrelly from isolation (though “wearing the same thing every day” still seems to be a proud tradition in the math community)

@thomasrinschler6783 Ай бұрын

No mention of how Milo (2:52) supposedly died? Since he was the champion at wrestling at five consecutive Olympic Games, he had the reputation as being the strongest man alive. When he met a farmer trying to split a stump with wedges, he said he could split it with his own bare hands. The farmer said to go at it, and left to get lunch. Milo put his hand into where the wedges were splitting the stump, but the wedges came out and his hand got trapped, and he wasn't quite strong enough to pull the stump apart. Before the farmer came back, he was attacked and killed by wolves or a lion.

@user-ju4cd6wj2j Ай бұрын

It's crazy. Every time I want to learn more about a subject, Jack releases a video for it.

@kaip310 Ай бұрын

The best part about this all is that Pythagoras didn't even come up with his namesake theorem. The concept was known for thousands of years before his time, he was just the most vocal cult leader to speak about the subject. Wikipedia article about the tablet that shows the theory before Pythagoras's time: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322

@alternateperson6600 22 күн бұрын

Just because people knew about the equation before the Greeks doesn't mean they've proven it. A statement without proof is just a conjecture, not a theorem.

@twotothehalf3725 Ай бұрын

Wasn't it in his cult that someone was killed for discovering that √2 is irrational, which goes against the universal harmony of rational numbers or something?

@wfbgenius Ай бұрын

Famous math story- his followers drowned the man who claimed to prove it. I was heartbroken when Jack failed to mention it.

@MatthewCaunsfield Ай бұрын

Won't someone please think of the BEANS????

@Darkgeran7 Ай бұрын

I was not expecting the beans

@darthcheney7447 Ай бұрын

If you have never seen Disney's "Donald Duck in Mathmagic Land" I recommend you do.

@lyokianhitchhiker Ай бұрын

Math is the science equivalent of eldritch magic.

@SylviaRustyFae Ай бұрын

4:00 The Greeks clearly had some fire flower

@chocaliciouz Ай бұрын

Not eating beans may not be as silly as it originally sounds. Eating fava beans can make you sick if you have hereditary G6P deficiency, which is more common in the Mediterranean region

@Elongated_Muskrat Ай бұрын

This video is like if a squared plus b squared equaled 2c squared.

@OrphicPolytheist Ай бұрын

Pythagoras's musical discovery was the octave. Before Pythagoras they only knew of 5 musical notes, and Pythagoras discovered another 2, giving us a total of 7 basic music notes, known as an octave.

@danielsantiagourtado3430 Ай бұрын

EARLY! Love your work 🎉🎉🎉❤❤❤

@mezzanoon Ай бұрын

your Ozzy accent is surprisingly good lol

@conradbaker Ай бұрын

awesome episode

@dave1595 Ай бұрын

Pythagoras sounded like an Australian hippie high on triangles and pentagons

@buttercxpdraws8101 Ай бұрын

Why does Pythagoras have an Aussie accent lol 😂 love your work Jack! ❤

@sizanogreen9900 Ай бұрын

Looking forward to Triangle Thursday already. Really brightens up my week every time.

@WestProter Ай бұрын

Oh new jack rackam video between two math exams I get to relax my brain and think about history not math…

@DetectiveLance Ай бұрын

Im pretty sure Jack didn't have to make anything up in the middle there.

@Pillzpop Ай бұрын

Damn, that animation budget went through the roof with the CGI.

@Amadeus451 Ай бұрын

But you haven't covered Archimedes yet? Dude built a death laser in Ancient Greece! Go! Go! Go!

@mathdhut3603 Ай бұрын

The disrespect by voicing him as George Harrison! 😂

@joaovitorreisdasilva9573 Ай бұрын

0:09 , first of all that little formula is probably one of the most useful formulas ever, and some people argue it is almost one of the basis of anything related to math (that also uses some level of geometry, which is basically everything). Second of all, pytagoras made more collaborations to different aspects of math that are still... somewhat useful to this day. You talk one atom less of that mofo and I'll literally refine the plutonium myself I tell ye! 😤 Edit after finish: good job!

@danphillips9382 Ай бұрын

Did I miss the joke that explains why he’s got an Australian accent lmao

@cheydinal5401 Ай бұрын

You should *DEFINITELY* make a video about the "*Captain of Köpenick*", a random guy in 1906 Köpenick, Prussia, who impersonated a military officer, convinced a few soldiers who were standing around to march around with him, then using them convinced a few more to follow him as well, until he had quite a few, then he marched on the mayor's office and robbed him, pretending to be acting on like the Kaiser's orders, "corruption charges" against the mayor He got away from the scene after taking the money, but was found later, but Wilhelm II pardoned him because everyone in the country found the whole story super funny

@Manbemanbe Ай бұрын

Actually a half decent Australian accent. Good job!

@MrPyrilo Ай бұрын

Gotta say, pretty pumped for triangle Thursday.

@GreatgoatonFire Ай бұрын

You should have gotten Reverse 1999 as a sponsor for this. Their main story just came to a island full of Pythagorean cultists. They even included the beans thing.

@gmg9010 Ай бұрын

Why does Pythagoras with glasses look like David Letterman?

@TheBronzeDog Ай бұрын

I remember watching Reign: The Conqueror and being weirded out by the Pythagorean Cult. One of the opening dialogues suggested they were trying to kill Alexander the Great and friends because they had irrational numbers assigned to them.

@safebox36 Ай бұрын

"He didn't invent music." It's worth noting that he also didn't invent his namesake theorem of a^2 + b^2 = c^2. It's around 2000 years older than Pythagoras himself and he might not even have known about it because the earliest written text we have on it from ancient Greece came from Euclid some 200 years later in the form of a different proof.

@TheShadowChesireCat Ай бұрын

Finally, talking about Triangle Man and his Triangle Cult! Pythagoras be there renouncing doing harm to others, yet my math teacher tried to make me learn maths when I have the math version of dyslexia. Pythagoras, still harming people's brains more than 2,500 years later. XD

@joshuahwieland8676 Ай бұрын

2:27 so close

@ballinlikestalin878 Ай бұрын

If we're doing greek philosophers you neeeeeed to do Diogones the cynic. Whata character

@IRosamelia Ай бұрын

If I hadn't heard a bit about all this years ago, I would have sworn you were punking us

@calexico66 Ай бұрын

Although the theorem gets his name, the fact is that Sumerians already were aware of this fact about triangles. It's possible that Egyptians were already aware of it as well, but Pythagoras got the credit.

@bazzfromthebackground3696 Ай бұрын

Bill Cipher is a big fan.

@tonyfriendly4409 Ай бұрын

I love how Pythagoras sounds like an Australian Russell Brand.

@JonGweel Ай бұрын

Triangle time, your vids are snazzy

@rutufn0596 Ай бұрын

To be an exceptionnel mathematicien always includes a part of crazyness.

@thebakerofbananabread3237 Ай бұрын

That was amazing. I have my next D&D villain

@gamergumilyov8579 Ай бұрын

I always wonderd, "what exactly is a death cult?" Now I know

@safebox36 Ай бұрын

I always knew Pythagoras was a Scouse-Aussie hybrid.

@TheTomac Ай бұрын

okay two questions: 1) why is he australian 2) why is australian pythagoras so damn funny to me

@TheAustralianMapper5378 Ай бұрын

When I was at school, my maths teacher briefly talked about this guy.

@javaks Ай бұрын

Another reference to Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy!

@sebastianlodge7549 Ай бұрын

Pythagoras being Australian pleased me.

@R.J._Lewis Ай бұрын

Babe! Wake up! New Jack Rackam just dropped!

@anyoneattheendoftime4932 Ай бұрын

Can't believe he didn't even mention Pythagoras drowning Hippasus for discovering the square root of two is not a fracture.

@lilpeckerponcho2357 19 күн бұрын

"Big classroom would have u believe" 😂

@yakobaa6728 Ай бұрын

3:20 got real big lez show vibes 😅

@theawesomeman9821 Ай бұрын

History has proven that even nerds can become revered as cult leaders

@pisces2569 Ай бұрын

Where the hell was this in math class? I would have enjoyed math so much more if this was taught

@matthewodonnell6906 Ай бұрын

Me: chilling, eating some spicy lentils over rice Pythagoras: HOW DARE YOU EAT BEANS!!! UNHAND THOSE POOR LENTILS, BARBARIAN!

@Rasc0117 Ай бұрын

I might have paid attention in math class if they showed this back when I was in school...

@jonathanwebster7091 Ай бұрын

"We can't do this, we number less than 20!" Pythagoras:"If only we numbered 21! Then we could form an equilateral triangle!"

@martinku86 Ай бұрын

I like how the video totally glossed over Milo of Croton, who is considered the GOAT wrestler in ancient period. He supposedly trained for each Olympic by carrying a new-born cow daily, for 4 years until the next Olympic. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton

@zintosion Ай бұрын

Hey its the triangle guy!

@faisalkamal4319 Ай бұрын

I think he showed em lemons 🍋

@unshallowifyable Ай бұрын

Pentagons may be from hell, but hexagons are the bestagons

@peggyliepmann5248 Ай бұрын

Any time an important historical figure seems like a straightforward figure, I end up wanting to poke around and find out what weird nonsense they believed in.

@Dayvit78 Ай бұрын

Is Pythagoras like an Australian Mick Jagger?

@chellybub Ай бұрын

No way you pulled off that Aussie, very tite

@KoBo33451 Ай бұрын

He valued the pentagon, but, of course, it's hexagons that are the bestagons.

@douglasboyle6544 Ай бұрын

I had no idea Pythagoras was an Aussie.

@Edgar-dp5qu Ай бұрын

I love Pythagoras being some stoned out of his gourd Australian bloke.

@bigfoot27909 Ай бұрын

Cylon took the lemons and burned Pythagoras' house down 😂

@karlgrimm3027 Ай бұрын

I think I saw a video about how he was influenced by Buddism.

@backabeyond Ай бұрын

If you read references in the Bible to the “One” as a Pythagorean, it adds a whole new light to God.

@ccjesper Ай бұрын

Video starts at 1:59

@OsirisLord Ай бұрын

Why does Pythagoras have an Australian accent?

@Thukad Ай бұрын

I don't understand what you don't understand

@danilopaes4058 Ай бұрын

Why all the Aristotle mockery? Guy's cool

@greenoftreeblackofblue6625 Ай бұрын

Oh yeah his cult like killed people who said they're were numbers he couldn't identify.

@michael24taggart Ай бұрын

From what I’ve heard, one of the members had discovered the idea of irrational numbers, Pythagoras, however, said it was blasphemous saying that only whole numbers exist so they drown the guy.

@joshuaevans6295 Ай бұрын

@@michael24taggart rational numbers, not whole numbers