Square Root of the Antichrist
According to legend, Pope Sylvester II was so caught up in millennial fever the first time around that he predicted the world would end at the stroke of midnight at the end of 999 AD. He held a service where folks fell on their faces at midnight. When it had passed and the world hadn't ended, several of them didn't get back up. They had died of fright. It's poppycock, says Nancy Marie Brown, author of The Abacus and the Cross: The Story of the Pope Who Brought the Light of Science to the Dark Age. "The Terrors of the Year 1000 is a myth," she argues. "The idea that all of Christendom quaked and cried in fear that the world would come to a crashing end precisely at midnight on December 31, 999, was made up by later historians hoping to brighten their own age by darkening the ones that came before." Brown's brush is too broad, yet she's right about Sylvester. Before he became pope, he wrote to a friend that he was "so oppressed by the scarcity of time," that he was "scarcely able to write anything to you." However, he did manage to remark on certain "geometrical figures." Brown quotes the letter at length, then explains it for the innumerate, "On the eve of the Apocalypse, [Sylvester] and his friends are discussing the best method for finding the area of a triangle." Leading up to the end of the first millennium AD, there were numerous predictions that the end was imminent, before, on, or just after the year 1000. One of Sylvester's more tedious tasks was assuring worried folks, from queens to paupers that there was no good reason to expect this would happen soon. For his mathematical efforts, he was portrayed as a sorcerer in league with the devil.
