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 if complex number exponentiation is used). An example that provides a simple constructive proof is The base of the left side is irrational and the right side is rational, so one must prove that the exponent on the left side, formula_17, is irrational. This is so because, by the formula relating logarithms with different bases, which we can assume, for the sake of establishing a contradiction, equals a ratio "m/n" of positive integers. Then formula_19 hence formula_20 hence formula_21 hence formula_22, which is a contradictory pair of prime factorizations and hence violates the fundamental theorem of arithmetic (unique prime factorization).