Philolaus

c. 470–385 BCE

Philolaus of Croton, a contemporary of Socrates, was the first Pythagorean to publish a book. It taught that the cosmos and everything in it is fitted together from limiting and unlimited things by harmony, that all that is known has number, and that the earth, with the sun, moon, planets and a counter-earth, circles a central fire. Plato drew on him in the Philebus and the Timaeus; some two dozen fragments survive, not all of them genuine.