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,
Proof that e is irrational between 2 and 3: We then analyze a blown-up difference "x" of the series representing "e" and its strictly smaller partial sum, which approximates the limiting value "e". By choosing the magnifying factor to be the factorial of "b", the fraction ⁄ and the partial sum are turned into integers, hence "x" must be a positive integer. However, the fast convergence of the series representation implies that the magnified approximation error "x" is still strictly smaller than 1. From this contradiction we deduce that "e" is irrational. Suppose that "e" is a rational number. Then there exist positive integers "a"