The Music of Pythagoras

The Music of Pythagoras

“Pythagoras’ 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. Kitty Ferguson in THE MUSIC OF PYTHAGORAS illuminates the legacy of this mathematician and mystic whose insights helped set the foundation of modern science.
Little is known of Pythagoras personally. Born around 570 BC on Samos, he founded his own school at Croton in southern Italy. While there, he and his followers started to investigate the world. While experimenting with lyres and considering why some combinations of string lengths produced beautiful sounds and others did not, they discovered that the ratios that underlie harmony make sense in a remarkably simple way. For example, pressing a string exactly halfway between the two ends produces a tone one octave higher than the open, unpressed string-and the ratio of those string lengths is 2 to 1.
“In a flash of extraordinary clarity,” Ferguson writes, “the Pythagoreans found that there is pattern and order hidden behind the apparent variety and confusion of nature, and that it is possible to understand it through numbers.” Nature was fundamentally mathematical—an idea that has spurred science ever since. (Yet nature was not always precisely describable, as the Pythagoreans discovered to their chagrin when trying to determine the length of the hypotenuse of a triangle whose short sides were of unit length.)
Ferguson takes us on a fascinating journey to see how this central insight percolated through subsequent centuries and cultures. Plato was one early proponent of the Pythagorean belief in the power of mathematics. Cicero invoked Pythagoras in his dialogues, and Copernicus counted the Pythagorean love of mathematical elegance as a point in favor of his elegant heliocentric model. In assigning a particular musical note to the heavenly bodies, Kepler was inspired by a similar scale allegedly crafted by Pythagoras. Later thinkers, from Bertrand Russell to Koestler, have also grappled with Pythagorean themes.
THE MUSIC OF PYTHAGORAS brilliantly captures the influence of this man and his school on the history of Western thought.

Hardcover: 320 pages

Publisher: Walker & Company ( April 15, 2008 )

Item #: 82-7923

ISBN: 0802716318

Product Dimensions: 6.125 x 9.25 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 24.0 ounces