History
It has been suggested that the concept of irrationality was implicitly accepted by Indian mathematicians since the 7th century BC, when Manava (c. 750 – 690 BC) believed that the square roots of numbers such as 2 and 61 could not be exactly determined. However, historian Carl Benjamin Boyer states that "...such claims are not well substantiated and unlikely to be true."
Read more about this topic: Irrational Number
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