Irrational Man Irrational Man Irrational Man: A Study In Existential Philosophy is a 1958 book by the philosopher William Barrett, in which the author explains the philosophical background of existentialism and provides a discussion of several major existentialist thinkers, including Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. "Irrational Man" helped to introduce existentialism to the English-speaking world and has been identified as one of the most useful books that discuss the subject, but Barrett has also been criticized for endorsing irrationality and for giving a distorted and misleading account of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Barrett discusses existentialism and its background,
Irrational number During the 14th to 16th centuries, Madhava of Sangamagrama and the Kerala school of astronomy and mathematics discovered the infinite series for several irrational numbers such as "π" and certain irrational values of trigonometric functions. Jyeṣṭhadeva provided proofs for these infinite series in the "Yuktibhāṣā". In the Middle ages, the development of algebra by Muslim mathematicians allowed irrational numbers to be treated as "algebraic objects". Middle Eastern mathematicians also merged the concepts of "number" and "magnitude" into a more general idea of real numbers, criticized Euclid's idea of ratios, developed the theory of composite ratios, and extended the concept of