Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. Hippasus had revealed a secret that was deadly to the Greek way of thinking, a secret that threatened to undermine the entire philosophy that the brotherhood had struggled to build. At the same time, he wondered whether his own logic was faulty, since he based his arguments on geometry, whose infinitely divisible lines automatically reject atomism. Yet through all its history, despite the rejection and the exile, zero has always defeated those who opposed it. To a modern eye, Mayan glyph writing is about as alien-looking as you can get Figure 3.
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