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(1994) Trends in the historiography of science, Dordrecht, Springer.
I take as my opening text the kind of thing my colleagues — certainly the mathematicians and often the historians of mathematics — might say about the beginnings of Greek mathematics. Something like this:The early Pythagoreans based their theory of proportion on commensurable magnitudes (or on the rational numbers, or on common fractions m/n), but their discovery of the phenomenon of incommensurability (or the irrationality of √2) showed that this was inadequate. This provoked problems in the foundation of mathematics that were not resolved before the discovery of the proportion theory that we find in Elements V.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-3596-4_17
Full citation:
Fowler, D. H. (1994)., The story of the discovery of incommensurability, revisited, in K. Gavroglu, J. Christianidis & E. Nicolaidis (eds.), Trends in the historiography of science, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 221-235.
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