The Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Oute

From Booklist The mystic Pythagoreans cast a long shadow through mathematical history. Mining commentary offered seemingly every century since Pythagoras lived, from about 570 to 500 BCE, science writer Ferguson acknowledges the fragmentary nature of evidence about the sage himself, but, having hit the books and visited Pythagoras’ traditional places of philosophizing (Samos and Croton in Italy), she successfully re-creates the Greek intellectual world in which Pythagoras and his secretive acolytes flourished. Discovering the orderly power of numbers, the Pythagorean project to equate mathematics with the cosmos explains its immortal allure. The beauty of Ferguson’s exploration is her expression of this seduction through time and civilizations up to the scientific present. Evoking Pythagoras’ pull on philosophers from Plato to Bertrand Russell, Ferguson shows how Pythagorean thought fascinated and even frightened great minds through the ages. The original Pythagoreans excited great hostility, and Russell was no fan either. A lively narrative and a bounty of information make Ferguson a must in popular mathematics. --Gilbert Taylor

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