Hippasus's Constant: A Proposal to Name √2 after the Discovery of Incommensurability
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The square root of two is often called "Pythagoras's constant." The name has no ancient basis. The number itself was computed twelve centuries before the Pythagoreans: the Old Babylonian tablet YBC 7289 (c. 1800–1600 BC) gives √2 ≈ 1;24,51,10 = 1.41421296, within 6×10⁻⁷. What is Greek is not the number but the event: the discovery that the diagonal and the side of a square have no common measure. Ancient testimony attributes that discovery to the Pythagorean school, records that the school treated it as forbidden knowledge, and tells of a member who divulged it and perished at sea — a member named in part of the tradition as Hippasus of Metapontum. We review the sources, state what they do and do not support, and propose the name Hippasus's constant for √2: not because Hippasus first computed the number, which he did not, but because √2 is the canonical symbol of the discovery of irrationality, and that discovery is traditionally tied to his name and to his fate. https://theoryof.space
Author: Stakhov, Yevhenii
Language: English
Subfield: Theoretical Computer Science
Field: Mathematics
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7221679346
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