A closer look
Your high school geometry teacher conveniently left out the part where math nerds used to operate like a lethal mafia cartel. Pythagoras believed that the universe was made of perfect, neat whole numbers and ratios. When his brilliant student Hippasus proved the existence of irrational numbers (specifically the square root of 2, which goes on forever), Pythagoras lost his absolute mind. Unable to mathematically disprove the kid, Pythagoras supposedly ordered his followers to throw Hippasus off a boat to drown, proving that murder is vastly easier than admitting you were wrong about triangles.
