I applaud your intellectual rigour. You are right, it is not confirmed if someone really got murdered over irrational numbers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

I applaud your intellectual rigour. You are right, it is not confirmed if someone really got murdered over irrational numbers (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippasus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippasus ). That is why I changed my comment right after I wrote it, to "fear that they were killed" instead of "have been killed". Let us not turn legends into facts.