"And they disliked this so much... I can't begin to tell you how much they disliked it.... so they took him out to sea, according to legend, and he didn't come back" - Roger Bowley on Hippasus' discovery that the square root of two was irrational.
A Pythagorean Dialogue
“Brothers! Brothers!” Hippasus burst into the agora waving his arms about wildly. “Brothers, hypotoneuse for you!”
“Did it ever occur to you”, muttered Goodnessgrasus surlily, sitting up and rubbing his eyes, “That some of us might have been busy?”
“Busy doing what, Goodnessgrasus?” asked Nobasus.
“Busy not sleeping with women, of course”, put in Didididdlus.
“Wait,” said the first. “We’re not supposed to sleep with women?”
“That doesn’t matter!” cried Hippasus. “What matters is what I’ve just discovered!” (He always got this way about maths).
“Is this about the root of two?” sighed Goodnessgrasus. “I know all about the root of two.”
“You do?” put in Didididdlus. “Wait, I thought that was forbidden?”
“No, that’s eating beans”, said the other.
“More things can be forbidden than just one!”
“Stop trying to make things more difficult than they have to be!” shot back Goodnessgrasus.
“No!” shouted Hippasus. “You’ve got to see this!”
“Well, show us”, they replied.
So he showed them.
“So you see”, concluded Hippasus, “It can’t be even, because this is odsd; and can’t be odd, because this is even”.
They all squinted at what Hippasus had drawn in the sand. “That’s odd”, put in one.
“No, even”, said another.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“YES.”
“NO!”
Things went on in this way for some time, and soon, fists were flying this way and that. It really was a very peaceful cult, so long as nobody urinated in the direction of the sun or mentioned the number 57 or waved a legume at them.
“So that”, concluded Hippasus, ignoring the fighting, “Is my proof”.
“Proof of what? That the square root of two is not a number?” said Goodnessgrasus.
“Of course it’s a number, you limp brain, it’s right there!” sighed Nobasus.
“It’s not!”
“He means to say, it’s not an even number.”
“It’s not odd.”
“It’s very odd.”
“It’s not!”
“It is!”
“It’s VERY not! It’s irrational!”
“That’s irrational!”
“No, you’re irrational!”
“No, you are!”
“This is all because”, put in Didididdlus, “You’ve been sleeping with women. If you’d kept yourself celibate, and just slept with men…”
“Sexist!” snapped Goodnessgrasus.
“No, you fool! We’re not celibate! We’re cenobite!” sneered Eshurediddleus.
“Same thing!”
“Is this what you’ve been confused about this whole time?”
“Just keep your obscener bites away from me!”
“No, read my lips! CE-NO-B…”
“Celibate, yes!” shouted Didididdlus. “And I can’t read! Pre-literate society, remember?”
“Pythagoras was MARRIED, you prize galoot! Just how celibate do you think HE was?”
“How dare you refer to the master that way? Take that!”
By now, a great fight was raging. “Malakas, the lot of them”, muttered Hippasus, shuffling off. As he was on his way out, in a great rage, now, that his discovery had not been acknowledged, he tripped into a bucket of water, and, knocking himself unconscious, drowned.
After the fight had died down, they found him there.
“Goodness gracious”, said Goodnessgrasus. “This is embarrassing.”
“Well,” said Nobasus. “Hippasus as he lived: doing what he loved.”
“This is no time for your poetic aphorisms, Nobasus!” snapped Didididdlus. “This is a huge embarrassment for the glorious Pythagorean sect. What are they going to say when they find out we let our best mathematician drown?”
“Oh”, said Nobasus. “I see”. They all lapsed into a tense silence.
“What if,” suggested Goodnessgrasus, “what if… we said we drowned him in the sea for his impiety?”
This cheered them all up immensely. They hadn’t drowned a fellow Pythagorean for impiety for such a long time.
“I suppose we did sort of drown him”, said Nobasus, after they had dumped his body in the ocean and walked off. “Now, about that proof of his…”
“Was it a proof?”
“I think I can just about remember it. Let’s write it down, and…”
“Pre-literate, remember?”
“Oh yes, I do apologise…”
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