We are told such a number as the square root of 2 worried Pythagoras and his school almost to exhaustion. Being used to such queer numbers from early childhood, we must be careful not to form a low idea of the mathematical intuition of these ancient sages; their worry was highly credible.
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"The most amazing thing about the world is that it is comprehensible."
"The great difficulty is to get rid of the idea that we are separate from the world."
"The most important thing for a scientist is to be open to new ideas and to be willing to question established beliefs."
"Even if I should be right in this, I do not know whether my way of approach is really the best and simplest. But, in short, it was mine."
"The scientific picture of the world is a simplification, an abstraction, and it is not the whole truth."
Austrian physicist who shared the 1933 Nobel for the wave equation that bears his name and the famous cat thought-experiment. Closely associated with Werner Heisenberg (matrix-mechanics rival who reached the same physics by different math) and Albert Einstein (his pen-pal on quantum interpretation). For an intellectual contrast, see Niels Bohr, Danish physicist and architect of the Copenhagen interpretation — Schrödinger's cat thought-experiment was specifically designed to ridicule Bohr's 'observer-dependent reality' reading of quantum mechanics — Schrödinger thought the Copenhagen interpretation was absurd; the cat was meant as reductio ad absurdum.
Reflecting on historical mathematical discoveries and their initial reception.
Date: Mid 20th century
Life & AgingFound in 1 providers: gemini
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Early mathematicians like Pythagoras were deeply troubled by irrational numbers like the square root of 2, which cannot be expressed as a simple fraction. We shouldn't judge them harshly for this anxiety—because we grow up casually accepting such numbers, we forget how genuinely unsettling they were to minds encountering them fresh. Their distress reflected profound mathematical sensitivity, not weakness.
Schrödinger, architect of quantum wave mechanics, spent his career confronting mathematics that defied classical intuition—wave functions, probability amplitudes, complex-number solutions describing physical reality. His empathy for Pythagorean anxiety mirrors his own experience normalizing deeply counterintuitive mathematics. As someone who made 'queer numbers' the foundation of modern physics, he understood viscerally how mathematical strangeness demands intellectual courage.
Schrödinger wrote amid early 20th-century physics' revolutionary upheaval—quantum mechanics and relativity dismantled centuries of intuitive certainty. Physicists routinely wrestled with mathematics that seemed to violate common sense: probability waves, uncertainty principles, imaginary-number operators. This climate made historical mathematical crises newly relevant, reminding scientists that confronting disturbing abstractions has always been the price of genuine understanding.
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