ABSTRACT
HISTORIANS are not agreed regarding the relevancy of the history of mathematics to the general history of science and philosophy. While Zeller treated it as negligible, except as mathematical concepts entered expressly into a system, some recent historians have regarded it as far more important, some going so far as to assign it to a leading role in the story. A story, of course, requires a hero, and Pythagoras would naturally play that part, were it not for the critical examination of the tradition that began, say, with the publication of Zeller's monumental work. In default of so imposing a figure, historians now tend to fall back upon the 'Pythagoreans', as one might tell the story of a nation as that of a reigning dynasty; for the Pythagoreans are conceived as the mathematicians par excellence of Greece down to the middle of the fourth century B.C.
