Pythagoras in Diapers

  

    A couple of years ago my wife and I were in the Pendleton Convention Center, watching a basketball game between the Coyotes and the Cougars. The Cougars were chomping some serious Coyote butt, 40-21. During a foul shot at the other end of the court, (after Coyote #22 was jerked to the floor by his ponytail,) we scurried up the out-of-bounds line and wedged ourselves into the fourth row of the bleachers behind a group of teenage girls with greasepaint paw prints on their cheeks and wearing white t-shirts emblazoned with Magic Marker slogans like “Scott is soooo hot” and “Number Nine is mine. Hands off.” 

    A few minutes later, while I was watching the Cougar point guard bring the ball up the floor with that stop-and-go, dribble-between-the-legs, shuck-and-jive stuff that nobody but the Globetrotters tried to do until twenty years ago, Caty nudged me in the ribs and pointed with a finger in her lap to the girl sitting front of her who sported raspberry Koolaid hair, designer-mangled jeans, and a real live three-month-old baby balanced between her knees. 

     The baby girl (I assumed because of the pink headband and dress) was staring up in the trussworks that supported the domed roof of the basketball court, her eyes following the gluelams from where they anchored to the wall plates, up to the center of the court and then back down, back up, back down, like a tiny engineer figuring snow load. I am a father and I know that my kids are way smarter than I, so it was not difficult to believe that the child actually understood what it was seeing. My mind, as is its propensity, skipped across the blue pond of the little mathematician’s eyes right into the story of Pythagoras and the bean field.
    Pythagoras was Greek, born about 575 B.C. on the island of Samos in the Aegean Sea. At the age of thirty, after having studied the teachings of Thales, ("You can't stick the same foot in the same river twice.") and having run into difficulties with the local authorities about his idea that maybe Greece wasn't the actual center of the universe, Pythagoras emigrated to the southern portion of what is today the Italian peninsula, to a small Greek settlement called Crotona. 

     Lacking any stonemason’s or olive picker’s skills, Pythagoras set himself up as a teacher of mathematics. Math was a new science, and he soon had three hundred students in his unusual school. For instance, for the first five years of enrollment, the student was required to maintain absolute silence in the classroom, to wear only a short skirt, male or female, to adhere to the diet of strict, non-ovo (eggs), non-lacto (milkshakes) vegetarianism, and to never, ever, on punishment of expulsion, eat a single, solitary bean. 

     Pythagoras left no written record of why he was legumaphobic. Aristotle, roughly his contemporary, does list a few reason why Pyth asked his students to abstain from beans, including “because they are destructive” “because they are like genitals,”  “because they are like the gates of Hades, the stems alone of all plants being without joints,” and because “a chewed bean placed in the sun smells of human semen or of murderously spilt human blood.” Aristotle also notes that the students were forbidden to touch white roosters. 
     But Pyth and his students did figure out some important stuff. Any concrete worker laying out a foundation knows the Pythagorean Theorem: In a right triangle, (one with a ninety-degree angle)  the sum of the squares of the lengths of the short sides equals the square of the hypotenuse, or long side, or  A times A, plus B times B, equals C times C. (Concrete workers know this as the 3,4,5 rule)
     Pyth and the kids took the relationship between numbers a few steps farther, suggesting that there existed a harmonic relationship between the objects in the night sky, and that if a person studied the heavens while imagining a bunch of triangles in the sky, one must come to the conclusion that the ground one was standing on was just a big ball spinning in space.
     Bigshots don't like to hear that the ground they walk on is not the focal point of all divine activity. The churchy Italian ruling class took issue with the new cosmology, and, finally, when Pythagoras was in his early eighties, the bosses sent troops out to find him and get rid of him. It is testimony to his dietary restrictions that he was able to flee at such an age. And flee he did, with ten of his top students, toward the southwest, into the flatland agricultural areas of southern Italy.
     He almost made it to safety, to the home of an influential father of one of his little math wizards. When Pythagoras arrived at the edge of the guy's farm, however, with the posse hot on his tail, he stopped, sat down in the dirt, refused to move, and waited to be caught. The father was a bean farmer. Rather than set foot in a field of beans, Pythagoras was apprehended, and executed, in Metapontum, Italy, in 493 B.C.

    There is a footnote to this story. Recently, a couple of scholars, Robert Brumbaugh and Jessica Schwartz, have made the argument that the Pythagorean prohibition of beans is best understood as a “commonsense injunction aimed at preventing acute hemolytic anemia in individuals with a hereditary deficiency of glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase in their red blood cells, or favism.” In other words, certain people under the age of 15, about 2 in 10,000, are allergic to fava beans, even to the touch. Those were the types of beans grown universally in pre-Christian Italy. So maybe the old mathematician was not totally off his rocker after all and sacrificed his life to save a couple of his young students.