 The ancient tradition gives no indication of who Philolaus’ teacher(s) might have been. Pythagoras died some twenty years before Philolaus was born. He might have had some contact with the Pythagorean Hippasus (ca. 530–450?), who was associated with the mathematics of music theory, which is also a prominent theme in Philolaus. Philolaus should not be understood as simply a Pythagorean, however. He was an important philosopher in his own right, and neither Plato nor Meno bothers to apply the label Pythagorean to him. He was influenced not just by the Pythagorean tradition but also as much or more by the broader tradition of Presocratic philosophy. He was undoubtedly aware of the work of the medical writer/philosopher Alcmaeon, who also came from Croton. Anaxagoras and Empedocles were the most prominent philosophers in the generation before Philolaus, and there is some evidence that he was in part responding to Anaxagoras (see 2.1). Philolaus was the contemporary of the mathematicians Hippocrates of Chios, who was the first to write an Elements of geometry, and Theodorus of Cyrene, and, although Philolaus was not a mathematician himself, his philosophy appears to have been influenced by the important new developments in Greek mathematics that they brought about. Like most philosophers of the fifth century his work is in part a response to Parmenides (see 2.1 and 3). 