I believed in the real Pythagoras and collected the surviving information about him bit by bit.

But the best proof of the existence of the real Pythagoras is his teaching. 500 years before our era in the law of integral-valued proportions in consonances, Pythagoras discovered the connection between mathematics and music, the two highest exponents of science and art. However, the greatness of Pythagoras consisted not only in the fact that he discovered the consonance law, but also managed to appreciate its true ideological significance. Not only “earthly” music is harmony and number, but the whole universe has a beautiful, simple and clear mathematical structure, the whole world is harmony and number, the whole Universe is organized according to the principle of musical harmony, the divine music of celestialspheres is played throughout the Universe. So the Pythagoreans came to their famous principle that everything is a number.

The ideas of Pythagoras were soon taken up by Plato and formulated by him in the form of the most important transnational and transepochal principle of science, which is the principle of mathematization of science. And Plato is in fact the whole subsequent world philosophy. That’s why the English philosopher and mathematician A. Whitehead called all Western philosophy only the sum of the footnotes to Plato.

So from Pythagoras and Plato you came to the whole of ancient philosophy?

Yes, the book “The Wreath of Wisdom of Hellas” – its latest edition – has the subtitle “Ancient philosophy in portraits and destinies from Thales to Boethius”. This is the essay of all