# Hippasus of Metapontum — The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers character guide

> Hippasus of Metapontum in The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius.

**Role:** supporting

**First appearance:** 0077-hippasus

## Snapshot

The Pythagorean who let an unspeakable number out of the bag, and was repaid with a shipwreck or a tomb — the sources disagree, which is rather the point.

## Who they are

A Pythagorean of Metapontum whose name survives less for what he proved than for what he allegedly revealed: that the ratio of a square's diagonal to its side cannot be expressed as a fraction. In a brotherhood that treated number as the fabric of the cosmos, that discovery was not a triumph but a scandal, and the stories of his death — drowning at sea, a tomb erected in his absence — read like philosophy's first casualty report. He matters because his fate dramatizes the moment abstract inquiry collides with a community's need for harmony, a tension that runs through the whole succession of thinkers Diogenes catalogues.

## In the story

### [Hippasus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_lives_and_opinions_of_eminent_philosophers_se/chapters/hippasus)

Pupil of Pythagoras; believed the universe is finite and in perpetual motion with definite cycles of change.

## Links

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