Pythagoras

He heard a blacksmith's hammers ringing in harmonic intervals and understood that number was not counting — it was the structure of reality. The school he founded at Croton was half monastery, half mathematical laboratory: members took vows of silence for five years before being permitted to speak. They believed the soul transmigrates, that beans must not be eaten, and that the cosmos itself sings — a music we no longer hear because it has never stopped.