Killing Pythagoras (Mediterranean Prize Winner 2015) (66 page)

Acknowledgments

The following people helped me enormously during the long process of editing my novel:

First of all, my parents, José Manuel and Milagros, who were always the first to return the various drafts of my manuscript, covered in red ink. Next, in alphabetical order: Jesús Álvarez-Miranda, Carmen Blanco, Olga Chicot, Lara Díaz, Arturo Esteban, Natalia García de Soto, Paco González, Javier Garrido, Máximo Garrido, Julián Lirio, María Maestro, Antonio Martín, Carlos Pérez-Benayas, Fernando Rossique, Cynthia Torres, and Tatiana Zaragoza. I would also like to thank the translator, Anamaría Crowe Serrano, and the translation editor, Anne Crawford, for their Herculean labors on the English edition.

Killing Pythagoras
would be a much poorer book were it not for all these people.

Last but not least, I’d like to thank my daughter Lucía for brightening each and every day with her inexhaustible affection and goodness.

xxx
www.marcoschicot.com
xxx

Notes

[1]
A regular tetrahedron is a three-dimensional object whose four sides are equilateral triangles. Pythagoreans considered it very important to an understanding of the geometric method of construction of the world.
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[2]
The regular dodecahedron is a three-dimensional object whose twelve sides are regular pentagons. For Pythagoreans, it was the most important object of all, as well as the most complex.
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[3]
For the sake of simplicity, numbers here will be written using our modern-day system of positional notation and decimal places. In almost all ancient cultures, the systems of notation used made arithmetical calculation much more laborious than it is today. Moreover, fractions were used in place of decimals, which had not yet been discovered.
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[4]
Archimedes claimed it was between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7
.
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[5]
It should be remembered that, during Pythagoras’ time, the closest known approximation to Pi—which they referred to as the quotient—had only been calculated to the first decimal place: 3.1
.
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[6]
The result—and the method—mentioned by Glaucus is correct. It would take almost two millennia, until 1400 A.D., for the Indian mathematician, Madhava, to go beyond this approximation, obtaining eleven decimal places
.
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[7]
The square root of 2 (1.4142135623…) is the number which, when multiplied by itself, is 2. It is an irrational number, that is, it has an infinite number of decimal places and cannot be expressed as a fraction of any whole number. During Pythagoras’ time, irrational numbers were unknown, and the best approximation to the square root of 2 was a fraction giving five correct decimal places
.
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[8]
7/5=1.4 and 10/7=1.428… By finding the mean (adding the fractions and dividing the result by 2—(7/5+10/7)/2)—we get the mid-point, which is the fraction 99/70=1.41428… As we can see, this greatly improves the approximation to the square root of 2, taking it from one correct decimal place, with 7/5, to four decimal places, with 99/70. If we repeat the process, we get 19601/13860=1.414213564…which gives eight correct decimal places. Using this simple process, with each step the number of correct decimal places grows exponentially
.
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[9]
A class of crustaceans, such as the barnacle
.
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[10]
During the mathematical research I did for the book, I also developed the method for calculating the square root of 2 attributed to Daaruk in the novel. To my disappointment, I discovered afterwards that at least part of this method has been known for some time, though it seems that the Pythagoreans would have considered it an important discovery. On my website, I also explain this method and some corollaries not mentioned in the novel.
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