Was Hippasus pushed? (and other mysteries of mathematics)
Was Hippasus pushed? If you are even mildly interested in the history of mathematics, it is likely that you will have heard something like the following story. The Pythagoreans (who were also into music in a big way) worshipped numbers, and believed them to be the basis of everything. If one were to do a modern caricature of this, it might go: Do you believe in Rock ’n’ Roll? Can mathematics save your soul? By numbers, they meant whole numbers or positive integers. Whether this included ‘one’ is a moot point, because later Greek mathematicians regarded ‘one’ as the ‘generator of numbers’. One day, a man called Hippasus discovered that the square root of 2 was irrational. This went so much against the Pythagorean world view that they took him out to sea and threw him overboard. It didn’t stop there, though.Read More...
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