The first example of a learning paradox can be found 500 years b.c. when Hippasos, the follower of Phytagoras, studied geometry. The Phytagorean's belief system was based on ratios of natural numbers. They would find the ratios governing structure in nature, in possible constructions, and in musical harmonies. The confirmation of the categories was so strong that the Phytagoreans thought of ratios and natural numbers as an expression of God and was linked to a divine experience. Hippasos' discovery showed that the sides and diagonal of a square are incommensurable; i.e. it is impossible to measure the length of the diagonal in units of the sides of the square. By this he brought the paradox to life - stating that the ratios of natural numbers (and a true divine proof of God's existence), is impossible (and hence false) for any geometric figure with a square. Almost 2000 years passed before the paradox of Hippasos was resolved with irrational numbers, more specifically the discovery that the root of the number 2 is irrational.
The paradox of Hippasos was both a falsidical paradox and a learning paradox. It was falsidical since it was based on a false assumption that all numbers must be rational. What seemed to be an antinomy paradox turned out to be falsidical by eliminating the constraints on the category of numbers and of ratios. As Quine points out – ‘one man's antinomy is another man's falsidical paradox, give or take a couple of thousand years. Further, it was a learning paradox as the beliefs, and hence, epistemic categories had evolved inside a social system of the Phytagorean, and failed to keep up with new external discoveries. 2000 years of development makes it easy for us to see how the Phytagoreans had developed categories that were internal and ‘closed' from reality, and that were 'self maintained’ by their confirmation of nature through mathematics. Hippasos's findings awakened the paradox by introducing a distinction based on increased complexity observed in geometry.