Did You Know That Square Root of 2 Was the First Irrational Number Discovered?
And a funny story associated with it?
Did you know that Pythagoreans preached that all numbers could be expressed as the ratio of integers, and the discovery of irrational numbers is said to have shocked them.
Pappus merely says that the knowledge of irrational numbers originated in the Pythagorean school, and that the member who first divulged the secret perished by drowning
Meta:
I read this first in Number Freak a great book about numbers (that i am currently reading). The proof of √2 being an irrational number is an interesting one.