There is a young boy named Jimmy sitting at his desk in his home. Jimmy is a freshman in high school aspiring to attend college and become successful in life. Jimmy is attempting to complete his geometry homework while he is listening to the new Three Doors Down album. Does Jimmy realize that the geometry he is calculating and even the music he is listening to were both highly influenced by one man and his way of thinking? That man is Pythagoras and that way of thinking has been named Pythagoreanism. Pythagorean thinking has been shared by many people in the past by unifying mathematics with the purification of the soul and has had great influence on modern western culture.
             Pythagoras was born on the island of Samos around 550 B.C. (Loomis 7). He must be considered one of the world's greatest men, but he wrote nothing, and it is hard to say how much of the doctrine we know as Pythagorean thinking is due to the founder of the society and how much is later development ("Harmony" 1). Sometimes he is represented as a man of science, a man of mathematics, a man of music, and sometimes as a preacher of religious doctrines, and we might be tempted to regard one or other of those characters as historical (Philip 3). The truth is that there is no need to reject his unique views. The union of mathematical genius and religion is the common link of Pythagoreans ("Harmony" 3). Pythagoras founded at Kroton a society that was at once a
             religious community and a scientific school. Such a group was bound to excite jealousy and mistrust, and we hear of many struggles. Pythagoras himself had to flee from Kroton to Metapontion, where he died (Loomis 9).
             Pythagoreans, both early ones in Kroton and ones thereafter, had two themes that were characteristic of their views. These themes were soul and number and were initially separate thoughts of early Pythagoreans. Their soul doctrine determined moral conduct. Thei...