By Alberto A. Martinez
ISBN-10: 0822962705
ISBN-13: 9780822962700
The Cult of Pythagoras can also be approximately invention in a favorable experience. most folk view mathematical breakthroughs as “discoveries” instead of invention or creativity, believing that arithmetic describes a realm of everlasting rules. yet mathematicians have disagreed approximately what's attainable and very unlikely, approximately what counts as an explanation, or even concerning the result of definite operations. was once there ever invention within the heritage of innovations similar to 0, unfavorable numbers, imaginary numbers, quaternions, infinity, and infinitesimals?
Martínez inspects a wealth of basic resources, in different languages, over a span of many centuries. by means of exploring disagreements and ambiguities within the background of the weather of arithmetic, The Cult of Pythagoras dispels myths that vague the particular origins of mathematical suggestions. Martínez argues that a correct heritage that analyzes myths unearths missed facets of arithmetic that may inspire creativity in scholars and mathematicians.
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Extra resources for The Cult of Pythagoras: Math and Myths
Sample text
In any case, who was Hippasus? Well, aside from maybe divulging a way to inscribe a dodecahedron in a sphere, he seems to show up in a few more ancient sources. For example, Aristotle mentions a Hippasus who believed that the world was fundamentally made of fire. 29 Anyhow, we don’t know who discovered incommensurability. 31 And how did the ancients first find that some lengths are incommensurable with others? We don’t know, but at least we have an allusion to an early proof. Aristotle made Table 3.
It is just a distortion of other stories. It originated by blending two mythical stories about death at sea. The story that a tomb was erected for Hippasus is also a misapprehension (see table 3). Note also that the accounts of Iamblichus and Pappus do not specify whether the discoverer of incommensurability was a Pythagorean. But it would seem that at least the Pythagoreans knew about the topic and that they were awfully disturbed when one of them made that knowledge public. And their god too was outraged?
10 T R I A NG L E SAC R I F IC E TO T H E G O D S example of the claim that Pythagoras introduced proof into mathematics. In the longtime bestselling book Men of Mathematics, first published in 1937, the mathematician Eric Temple Bell claimed: “Pythagoras then imported proof into mathematics. This is his greatest achievement. 41 Much earlier, the notion that Pythagoras proved the hypotenuse theorem spread thanks to the imaginative words of Galileo Galilei. ”42 But really, what are the earliest traces of the idea that Pythagoras was engaged in mathematics at all?