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 1 = 0, and this latter polynomial has no rational roots (the only candidates to check are ±1, and "x", being greater than 1, is neither of these), so "x" is an irrational algebraic number. Because the algebraic numbers form a subfield of the real numbers, many irrational real numbers can be constructed by combining transcendental and algebraic numbers. For example, 3 + 2, + and "e" are irrational (and even transcendental). The decimal expansion of an irrational number never repeats or terminates (the latter being equivalent to repeating zeroes), unlike any rational number. The same is true for binary,