Hippasus And Irrational Number Legend
In the 5th century BC, followers of Pythagoras believed that everything in the universe could be explained by whole numbers and their ratios, and they treated their mathematical discoveries as guarded secrets within a tight-knit brotherhood. Later tradition says that one member, often identified as Hippasus of Metapontum, proved that the diagonal of a unit square has a length equal to the square root of 2 and that this number cannot be written as a ratio of two integers, shattering the belief that all magnitudes are rational.
According to the legend, the Pythagoreans saw this revelation as a betrayal, and Hippasus drowned at sea soon afterward, with the story framing his death as punishment for exposing the existence of irrational numbers. Historians now treat the drowning tale as a myth rather than a documented murder, but it remains one of the most enduring stories about someone supposedly killed for a mathematical truth.