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 Proof that e is irrational The number "e" was introduced by Jacob Bernoulli in 1683. More than half a century later, Euler, who had been a student of Jacob's younger brother Johann, proved that "e" is irrational; that is, that it cannot be expressed as the quotient of two integers. Euler wrote the first proof of the fact that "e" is irrational in 1737 (but the text was only published seven years later). He computed the representation of "e" as a simple continued fraction, which is Since this continued fraction is infinite and every rational number has a terminating continued