Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Pythagoras and Bertrand Russell


I recently read the first section of Bertrand Russell's book: The history of Western Philosophy. In it I came across a marvelous "result" attributed to Pythagoras: Since the hypotenuse of a right angle triangle with unit sides is the an the square root of 2, the axiomatic basis of geometry cannot be arithmetic and must be something independent of it.

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