This caused a fuss. The Pythagoreans, you have to remember, were extremely weird. Their philosophy was a chunky stew of things we’d now call mathematics, things we’d now call religion, and things we’d now call mental illness. They believed that odd numbers were good and even numbers evil; that a planet identical to our own, the Antichthon, lay on the other side of the sun; and that it was wrong to eat beans, by some accounts because they were the repository of dead people’s souls. Pythagoras himself was said to have had the ability to talk to cattle (he told them not to eat beans) and to have been one of the very few ancient Greeks to wear pants.
The mathematics of the Pythagoreans was inseparably bound up with their ideology. The story (probably not really true, but it gives the right impression of the Pythagorean style) is that the Pythagorean who discovered the irrationality of the square root of 2 was a man named Hippasus, whose reward for proving such a nauseating theorem was to be tossed into the sea by his colleagues, to his death.
