From Egypt, and possibly from Babylon, geometry passed to the shores of Asia Minor and Greece. The scientific study of the subject begins with Thales, one of the Seven Wise Men of the Grecian civilization. Born at Miletus, not far from Smyrna and Ephesus, about 640 B.C., he died at Athens in 548 B.C. He spent his early manhood as a merchant, accumulating the wealth that enabled him to spend his later years in study. He visited Egypt, and is said to have learned such elements of geometry as were known there. He founded a school of mathematics and philosophy at Miletus, known from the country as the Ionic School. How elementary the knowledge of geometry then was may be understood from the fact that tradition attributes only about four propositions to Thales,--(1) that vertical angles are equal, (2) that equal angles lie opposite the equal sides of an isosceles triangle, (3) that a triangle is determined by two angles and the included side, (4) that a diameter bisects the circle, and possibly the propositions about the angle-sum of a triangle for special cases, and the angle inscribed in a semicircle.[18] The greatest pupil of Thales, and one of the most remarkable men of antiquity, was Pythagoras. Born probably on the island of Samos, just off the coast of Asia Minor, about the year 580 B.C., Pythagoras set forth as a young man to travel. He went to Miletus and studied under Thales, probably spent several years in Egypt, very likely went to Babylon, and possibly went even to India, since tradition asserts this and the nature of his work in mathematics suggests it. In later life he went to a Greek colony in southern Italy, and at Crotona, in the southeastern part of the peninsula, he founded a school and established a secret society to propagate his doctrines. In geometry he is said to have been the first to demonstrate the proposition that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares upon the other two sides of a right triangle. The proposition was known in India and Egypt before his time, at any rate for special cases, but he seems to have been the first to prove it. To him or to his school seems also to have been due the construction of the regular pentagon and of the five regular polyhedrons. The construction of the regular pentagon requires the dividing of a line into extreme and mean ratio, and this problem is commonly assigned to the Pythagoreans, although it played an important part in Plato's school. Pythagoras is also said to have known that six equilateral triangles, three regular hexagons, or four squares, can be placed about a point so as just to fill the 360 deg., but that no other regular polygons can be so placed. To his school is also due the proof for the general case that the sum of the angles of a triangle equals two right angles, the first knowledge of the size of each angle of a regular polygon, and the construction of at least one star-polygon, the star-pentagon, which became the badge of his fraternity.