The Nameless Pythagorean

He was quite a man, extraordinary, really. Where he came from, we did not know. His age, the name of his father, whether he be Greek, Thracian, Milesian or even Italian, was any man’s guess. He was quite accomplished, and learned much in his years of wandering among the sands of Egypt and the hills of Persia and countless lands between. There truly was never one like him to walk this earth. Pythagoras was special.

He taught us many, many things. What to eat. How to sharpen the mind and the body. How to live. The tales of the sky. But the underpinning to his thought was simply this: All is Number. From the pluckings of a lyre to the stars and wanderers in the firmament, All is explainable by the interaction between two whole numbers. The Master made it all clear to us and all who would listen.

Then, the theorem. Though he said it was a gift from the gods – and perhaps it was – we all sensed it was carved out from years of hard observation and precise measurement. The square of each of the lesser sides of a right triangle was always equal the square of its hypotenuse. Or, in a special case, the square of two adjacent sides of a square is equal to the square of its diagonal.

But then he appeared. He Who Shall Remain Nameless. He was fascinated with the square diagonal. Indeed, the Master warned him off many times, but the Nameless One persisted. And that is why we had to kill him.

For if the theorem states simply that the square of side A added to the square of side B is equal to the square of side C (C being the hypotenuse or the diagonal of a square), and the All is explained by the relationship and interaction of two whole numbers, how does one determine the length of the diagonal of a square? Should A = 1 and B = 1, then must not C be the square root of 2, which is …

Which is unsolvable as the interaction of two whole numbers. The Nameless One spent many years on this problem, trying to force a resolution, trying to come to an understanding, at first working with the Master but later despised by him, as it became clear to all of us that something was very, very wrong with our world. Then, he simply accepted the unacceptable, and bade us do similar.

And that is why we did what we had to do. We bound him in chains, rowed out onto the violent Great Sea until Croton could no longer be seen, and threw him over the side of our ship, abandoning him to the deeps.

But his specter haunts us still. For there is no way to solve the square root of the whole number 2 …