How Pythagoras Turned Math Into a Tool for Understanding Reality

upstart writes:

The 'music of the spheres' was born from the effort to use numbers to explain the universe:

If you've ever heard the phrase "the music of the spheres," your first thought probably wasn't about mathematics.

But in its historical origin, the music of the spheres actually was all about math. In fact, that phrase represents a watershed in the history of math's relationship with science.

In its earliest forms, as practiced in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, math was mainly a practical tool for facilitating human interactions. Math was important for calculating the area of a farmer's field, for keeping track of workers' wages, for specifying the right amount of ingredients when making bread or beer. Nobody used math to investigate the nature of physical reality.

Not until ancient Greek philosophers began to seek scientific explanations for natural phenomena (without recourse to myths) did anybody bother to wonder how math would help. And the first of those Greeks to seriously put math to use for that purpose was the mysterious religious cult leader Pythagoras of Samos.

It was Pythagoras who turned math from a mere tool for practical purposes into the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. As the historian Geoffrey Lloyd noted, "The Pythagoreans were ... the first theorists to have attempted deliberately to give the knowledge of nature a quantitative, mathematical foundation."

[...] Pythagoras believed that, at its root, reality was made from numbers. That sounds crazy to modern minds taught that matter is made of atoms and molecules. But in ancient times, nobody really knew anything about what reality is. Every major philosopher had a favorite idea for what sort of substance served as reality's foundation.

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