Irrational exuberance Pink also used the phrase in 2009 in his book "" in the chapter discussing how extrinsic motivation can encourage short-term thinking at the cost of long-term health: "This is the nature of economic bubbles: What seems to be irrational exuberance is ultimately a bad case of extrinsically motivated myopia". Irrational exuberance "Irrational exuberance" is a phrase used by the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, Alan Greenspan, in a speech given at the American Enterprise Institute during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. The phrase was interpreted as a warning that the market might be overvalued. Greenspan's comment was made during
Irrational number numbers are irrational. The first proof of the existence of irrational numbers is usually attributed to a Pythagorean (possibly Hippasus of Metapontum), who probably discovered them while identifying sides of the pentagram. The then-current Pythagorean method would have claimed that there must be some sufficiently small, indivisible unit that could fit evenly into one of these lengths as well as the other. However, Hippasus, in the 5th century BC, was able to deduce that there was in fact no common unit of measure, and that the assertion of such an existence was in fact a contradiction. He did this by