After graduation, he worked in the Wadsworth, Ohio, school district, but soon joined the Air Corps for World War II, where he became a lieutenant and was stationed in New Guinea and the Philippines.
He died on April 25, 2014, in Washington, D.C.[1] McClain credits colleagues Ernst Levy and Siegmund Levarie and their writings for introducing him to Pythagoreanism via the insights of 19th century theorist Albert von Thimus, who provided the keys to unlocking Plato's mathematical riddles.
[citation needed] His writings offer a musical-mathematical explanation of crucial passages in texts of world literature, including the Bible, the Rig Veda, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and Plato.
McClain's explanation is based on the meanings of these numbers within the context of the quadrivium, the four ancient mathematical disciplines of arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy.
He argued that his discovery of identical or similar numbers and parallel mathematical constructs in Sumer, Egypt, Babylon, Palestine and Greece, suggests the historical continuity of a common spiritual tradition linking the microcosm of the soul to the macrocosm of the universe.