Where can I find information on the career that Pythagoras had as a teacher?

I am doing a report on Pythagoras for math class. I am stuck on a part of it. It says that I need to describe his career as a math teacher. Where can I find information on the career that Pythagoras had as a teacher? I need it to be simple information that an eigth grader can understand.



Thanks so much.Where can I find information on the career that Pythagoras had as a teacher?This is a difficult question! Pythagoras' own writings (if there were any) have not survived to the present time.



The best sources besides the man himself would be the members of his group (read the Wikipedia page on "Pythagoreans"). Unfortunately, the Pythagoreans were more than a group of math students. They were what we might call today a religious cult.



For them, math was mixed up with philosophy, mysticism, and religion. Secrecy was a part of their cult. The best people who could have written about Pythagoras' math teaching probably didn't, because his math teaching was bound up with his mystical teaching and some of that was secret.



Wikipedia says it well: "Many of the accomplishments credited to Pythagoras may actually have been accomplishments of his colleagues and successors." Some think that Pythagoreans themselves might have attributed their own work to Pythagoras. Or it could just be that the achievements of any member of the group were credited by others to the leader (even today's news media might attribute something Microsoft has done to Bill Gates, whether or not he had anything personally to do with it).



Much of the information we have about the Pythagoreans comes from sources that lived generations after Pythagoras died. (Read the Wikipedia page on Pythagoras and click on any of the names of people who say stuff about him. Some of them lived hundreds of years later.) It is hard to separate fact from fiction (or fact that has been modified in the interest of telling a better story). For this reason I would be suspicious of any stories of Pythagoras that seem "too detailed" (e.g. "one day Pythagoras got up and did so-and-so..."). There simply is no way of knowing that kind of information about a religious leader who lived 2500 years ago.



If I had to talk about his career as a math teacher, I would stick to easily verifiable facts. Pythagoras apparently saw math everywhere and regarded it with mystical significance. In most parts of the world then, math was a tool for businesses, people who built large things, and people who measured land. These aren't very mystical.



Pythagoras and his followers believed that math was _everywhere_--- in music, in philosophy, and in religion. They were inclined to see numbers and mathematics as a unifying force behind a lot of different things. This is a powerful idea (even if he took it in a religious direction that seems kind of silly today).



Today we are used to mathematics being everywhere. All of our computerized gadgets (computers, cell phones, Ipods, etc) make use of math and probably wouldn't have existed if their developers didn't understand the math behind them. Pythagoras apparently saw the unifying potential of math in a world that had no gadgets. His followers looked for mathematical connections between things that might not have occurred to businessmen or builders or other users of math in his time who were used to thinking of math only as a tool. That is a powerful contribution to math teaching.



It is said that Euclid, who wrote the most well known and most used geometry book of all time, took the inspiration for the structure of his book (the "Elements") from the Pythagorean world view. Instead of presenting mathematics as it had often been done--- as an isolated collection of facts and procedures--- Euclid begins by laying out a few ground rules and develops all of geometry (and a lot of arithmetic) from that. If you read more about Euclid's Elements (online or in books) you will probably find out more about how Pythagoras' way of looking at things contributed to it.



I hope this helped.