excepting, perhaps, the icosaedron. In Pythagorean philosophy, they represent respectively the four elements of the physical world; namely, fire, air, water, and earth. Later another regular solid was discovered, namely the dodecaedron, which, in absence of a fifth element, was made to represent the universe itself. Iamblichus states that Hippasus, a Pythagorean, perished in the sea, because he boasted that he first divulged "the sphere with the twelve pentagons." The star-shaped pentagram was used as a symbol of recognition by the Pythagoreans, and was called by them Health.
Pythagoras called the sphere the most beautiful of all solids, and the circle the most beautiful of all plane figures. The treatment of the subjects of proportion and of irrational quantities by him and his school will be taken up under the head of arithmetic.
According to Eudemus, the Pythagoreans invented the problems concerning the application of areas, including the cases of defect and excess, as in Euclid, VI. 28, 29.
They were also familiar with the construction of a polygon equal in area to a given polygon and similar to another given polygon. This problem depends upon several important and somewhat advanced theorems, and testifies to the fact that the Pythagoreans made no mean progress in geometry.
Of the theorems generally ascribed to the Italian school, some cannot be attributed to Pythagoras himself, nor to his earliest successors. The progress from empirical to reasoned solutions must, of necessity, have been slow. It is worth noticing that on the circle no theorem of any importance was discovered by this school.
Though politics broke up the Pythagorean fraternity, yet the school continued to exist at least two centuries longer. Among the later Pythagoreans, Philolaus and Archytas are the most prominent. Philolaus wrote a book on the Pythago-
