Pythagoras

Pythagoras was born circa 570 B.C. on the Greek island of Samos. His father is thought to have been a gem-engraver, and it is probable that Pythagoras would have been trained in the same craft. As a young man of 22, Pythagoras travelled to Egypt, afterwards studying for 3 years in the temples of Tyre and Sidon. On his return journey to Egypt he lived for a period at a temple on Mount Carmel, Israel. He left Egypt for Babylon before returning to Greece. 

Pythagoras considered numbers as the essence and principle of all things, and attributed to them a real and distinct existence. They were considered somehow to have substance. That a divine order, invisible to human eye but perceptible to the mind, was imposed on the world through them. They were the elements out of which the universe was constructed.

 Around 530 B.C. he emigrated to the Greek colony of Croton in southern Italy where he founded the famous Pythagorean school of philosophy, mathematics, and natural sciences. Pythagoras  taught practiced mathematics, vegetarianism and the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. (After death, a man's soul enters the body of a newborn infant or animal and so lives again.)

 Pythagoras is said to have invented the lyre.