#The Cult of Pythagoras
##The Pythagorean Theorem
- a^2 +b^2 = c^2 in ancient greece - the square literally meant the square around it
- a^2 +b^2 = c^2 in computer science - it's a formula for finding the shorest distance. Can be used to quantify distance and cluster results (like Netflix ratings and other predictive filtering algorythms)
but who was pythagoras.....
##Early Life of Pythagoras
- born in Turkey
- moved to Eqypt and studies with the preists
- loved the relationship between numbers (whole numbers)
- thought he was descendants of a greek god and remembered all his past lives
##Cult of Personality
- moved back home and started a "cult" - the mathēmatikoi
- women were allowed!
- were vegetarians
- weren't allowed to eat beans
- weren't allowed to copulate in the summer
##MURDER!
- as mentioned above, they loved whole numbers
- thought every thing in the world - music, architechture, the cosmos, could be expressed as a rational number - ratio of two other numbers
- Hippasus, a member of the mathematikoi proved the existence of irrational numbers - specifically the golden ratio or maybe sqrt2
- Pythagoras pushed him out of a boat to keep irrational number a secret!
##Death
- the mathematikoi had kept people out
- some of them got mad and set pythagoras's house on fire
- he got out but while running away came upon a bean field and stopped, he really hated beans
- so the murderers caught up to him and slaughtered him