Description
A squared plus b squared equals c squared. It sounds simple, doesnโt it? Yet this familiar expression opens a gateway into the riotous garden of mathematics, and sends us on a journey of exploration in the company of two inspired guides, Robert and Ellen Kaplan. With wit, verve, and clarity, they trace the life of the Pythagorean theorem, from ancient Babylon to the present, visiting along the way Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, President James Garfield, and the Freemasonsโnot to mention the elusive Pythagoras himself, who almost certainly did not make the statement that bears his name.The Theorem is a cornucopia of puzzles and discoveries. It has hundreds of proofs or is it thousands, as the curious Professor Loomis remarked in a cryptic aside? Its generalizations are stunning: it holds true not just in two dimensions, but in any number you like, up to infinity. And in perhaps its most intriguing feature of all, this tidy expression revealed, inexorably, the untidy profusion of irrational numbers, to the dismay of Pythagoras's disciples. As in the authors' bestselling The Nothing That Is and Chances Are, the excitement of mathematics leaps from the pages of Hidden Harmonies.
ISBN:9781608193981
