This truism might not seem all that radical, but it took until the mid-20th century for scientists to fully appreciate the idea's weight. Very simple things can sometimes generate unimaginably complex results. While he later called it his greatest mistake, decades afterwards the idea was dusted off and shown to exist in the form of the mysterious substance dark energy, which is driving an accelerated expansion of the universe. He tried to add a variable into the result denoted by the Greek letter lambda that acted counter to gravity to make the cosmos static. Einstein famously didn't like the idea of an expanding or contracting universe, which his theory of general relativity suggested would happen due to the effects of gravity. They combine all the important aspects of the cosmos, including its curvature, how much matter and energy it contains, and how fast it's expanding, as well as a number of important constants, like the speed of light, the gravitational constant and the Hubble constant, which captures the accelerating expansion of the universe. Using Einstein's theories of relativity, Freidmann showed that the characteristics of an expanding universe could be expressed from the Big Bang onward using two equations. It seems like hubris to think you can create a set of equations that define the entire cosmos, but that's just what Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann did in the 1920s. (Until that point, no one in recorded history had come across such numbers.) For his discovery, Hippasus is said to have been cast into the sea, because the followers of Pythagoras (including Hippasus) were so disturbed by the possibility of numbers that went on forever after a decimal point without repeating, according to an article from the University of Cambridge.
In the fifth century B.C., the mathematician Hippasus of Metapontum noticed that an isosceles right triangle whose two base sides are 1 unit in length will have a hypotenuse that is the square root of 2, which is an irrational number. Along with finding use in construction, navigation, mapmaking and other important processes, the Pythagorean theorem helped expand the very concept of numbers. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras is credited with writing down the version of the equation used today, according to the University of St. This is usually written as a^2 + b^2 = c^2, and it has been known for at least 3,700 years, since the time of the ancient Babylonians. One of the first major trigonometric rules that people learn in school is the relationship between the sides of a right triangle: the length of each of the two shorter sides squared and added together equals the length of the longest side squared.
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