On Sep 14, 2005, at 5:45 PM, deivy petrescu wrote:
On Sep 14, 2005, at 14:41, Matt Neuburg wrote:
On Tue, 13 Sep 2005 12:02:44 -0600, Gnarlodious
<email@hidden> said:
I have often considered zero to be an unreasonable number
Zero is reasonable. The square root of two is not, and was
correctly named so by the Greeks who actually called it
"unreasonable". (The Latin calque "irrational" loses a lot in
translation.)
I have no idea of whom was the unreasonable Greek that called
square root of 2 unreasonable. It is not. It is actually very
reasonable. It is the length of the diagonal of a square of side
1. This seems quite reasonable to me!
Well, that's because you're not 6th century-BC Greek cultist. =) The
"discovery" (and suppression of) irrational numbers is credited to
the Pythagoreans, who believed that all things are, essentially,
numeric. The idea of a number that had a perfectly simple geometric
representation yet could not be written down precisely was profoundly
disturbing to them. Other classes of numbers have suffered similar
prejudices -- negatives, trancendentals, trans-finites, and so on.
See <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean> and <http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrational_number>.
--Chris Nebel
AppleScript and Automator Engineering