Pythagoras, whom Google calls a “public figure,” founded a school (which is a kind of square) and then died. 1 of the school’s beliefs (also a kind of square) was that any number could be written as a ratio, a fraction of 2 whole numbers. This would make the numerical universe, and by extension the world (a 3rd kind of square), rational. About a century later, as the apocrypha would have it, a Pythagorean named Hippasus discovered that the square root of 2 (the length of either diagonal of a square with sides of length 1) could not be written as a ratio of 2 whole numbers. If you tried you’d get a contradiction, and Marx & Hegel were a ways off yet, so Hippasus’s Pythagorean peers looked the gift horse of this result right in its surd mouth and pushed H off a cliff to his death (the final square). Fast forward to many, many years later and a late-teenage boy is in high school biology, filling in recessive & dominant alleles in a slow, confusing attempt to understand life (which is so rarely a square). The boy drops his pencil, and when he leans down to pincer it off the floor another boy has already picked it up, a boy with perfect hair & political aspirations (squares par excellence) the 1st boy is about, completely unawares, to ruin. Years later when they are old, tired, & happy on Cape Cod, the 1st boy will write a diary entry à la Ned Rorem explaining their whole romance (a kind of square you can fold up into a paper heart). Like this history, it’ll have 289 words (incl. title)—i.e. the square of 17.