Pythagoras

Pythagoras left the Greek island of Samos around 570 BC and travelled to Croton in southern Italy circa 530 BC, where he founded a school steeped in secrecy, communal living, and ascetic discipline. In antiquity he was credited with discovering the Pythagorean theorem, the five regular solids, the sphericity of the Earth, and the identity of the morning and evening stars as Venus — though modern scholars suspect many of these breakthroughs came from his followers, like Hippasus and Philolaus. The teaching most firmly his own: metempsychosis, the belief that immortal souls enter new bodies afte…