So, this page. This page is one of my favorites, because it shows just how much of a nerd Dirk is, and how wrapped up he and Hal are in their bizarre ironic one-upmanship games even though they don’t really seem to derive any enjoyment for them anymore. One thing to note in this convo is that, in keeping with Dirk’s focus on philosophy and history, they’re not really talking math, even if it might seem like it. More specifically, they’re talking math history.
The theme of the conversation is making bigshot claims of amazingness, while simultaneously introducing deliberate errors in one’s claims.
Hal opens the convo by talking about pi, the “big circle number”. Now, calculating digits of pi is indeed a popular method of testing the computational power and correctness of a computer. However, Hal claims to have “solved” pi, calculating every last digit. This is patent bullshit. As Dirk states, pi doesn’t have an end, it keeps going literally forever, never repeating, and this is one of the reasons why it’s so popular as a test. By claiming to have solved pi, Hal is “inadvertently” admitting to having made an obvious error in his calculations.
What’s interesting, though, is how Dirk claims it to be bullshit, by invoking “an ancient Greek guy” who “settled shit about irrational numbers” “practically when math was invented”, because this, too, is totally wrong, albeit in a more subtle, Dirk-esque way. Considering his interest in Greek philosophy, Dirk would indeed know the story of Hippasus of Metapontum, and how his heretical mathematical discoveries drove his peers to drown him.
Now, Hippasus (who may or may not have actually existed) is indeed credited with the discovery of irrational numbers, which are numbers that cannot be expressed as a fraction of two other numbers (and thus necessarily have no end to their decimal expressions), but the irrational number he’s credited with discovering isn’t pi, it’s the square root of two. Indeed, while pi is irrational, it took until the 18th century to fully prove this, and Lambert, the guy who first did so, was Swiss, not Greek. (Of course, the other, sadder joke here is that the 18th century, too, is ancient history from Dirk and Hal’s post-apocalyptic vantage point, though this is not clear at the point the conversation first happens)
And of course, Hal responds to Dirk’s confusion of history by claiming to have found all the prime numbers, which was proven to be impossible by an ancient Greek guy, specifically Euclid, in his work Elements, a book which mathematicians tend to regard with an awe close to what many people hold for the Bible, and which could by some if far from all definitions of mathematics be considered “practically when math was invented”.
And then Dirk tries to pretend he doesn’t know what prime numbers are for some reason? Yeah, I’m not actually sure if he’s doing something there or just being an ass.
Flying through Storytelling 