Hippasus pythagoras biography
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The dangerous ratio
It's a stormy day on the sea off the coast of Greece. The date is around 520 BC. Fighting for his life, a man is heaved over the side of a boat and dropped into the open water to die. His name is Hippasus of Metapontum. His crime? Telling the world a mathematical secret. The secret of the dangerous ratio.
The murder of Hippasus is a matter of legend, but the secret was real, and certainly dangerous enough to the beliefs of those who knew about it.
It was a secret owned by the school of Pythagoras. These early Greek mathematicians (Pythagoras himself was born around 569 BC ) were obsessed with the significance of whole numbers and their ratios. The Pythagorean's motto, carved above the entrance of the school, was "All is number".
The inner circle of the school, the mathematikoi, believed that the universe was built around the whole numbers. Each number from one to ten was given a very special significance. Odd numbers were thought to be male and even numbers female. Yet there was one number that the Pythagoreans found terrifying, the number that might have cost Hippasus his life for revealing its existence to the world.
The name Pythagoras these days is best remembered for a geometrical theorem, the one that tells us how to calculate the lengths of th
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Hippasus and Irrational Numbers
Greek mathematician Hippasus is believed to have died because of the discovery of irrational numbers, those numbers could not be expressed as the ratio of 2 integers, for example, √2 , while in China, such numbers are called “面”, which can be translated to “noodle”. However, there are still lots of mysteries in this story.
Who is this mathematician?
Hippasus of Metapontum, a Greek mathematician and philosopher, who probably lived in the late 5th century BC, is widely believed to have been the first to discover irrational numbers, and to have died for achievement, either as divine retribution by the Gods, or put to death by his fellow Pythagoreans.
As a Pythagorean philosopher, he was cited by Aristotle in <Metaphysics>, and Diogenes Laertius <in Lives of Eminent Philosophers>, so his brilliance is certain.
Unfortunately, as a mathematician, there are only a few contradictory and ambiguous legends about him. The first question is about his birth. Iamblichus (a philosopher in about 3rd century AD) wrote in <On the Pythagorean way of life>: “Some say Hippasus was a Crotoniate, others that he was a Metapontine.”
What has he done as mathematician?
The discovery of i
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Boxing Pythagoras
The Narrative of Hippasus
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