Yes. I think the mathematicians were lucky that it didn't happen on the sort of integers they were discussing (there was, after all, great discussion about irrational numbers, zero , later imaginary numbers, and even Archimedes' attempt to describe big integers was probably not without controversy ).

Hmm, in that case, it might be relevant to point out examples that don't quite fit Plasmon's situation but are almost the same: There are a variety of examples where due to a lack of rigorous axiomatization, statements were believed to be true that just turned out to be false. One classical example is the idea that of a function continuous on an interval and nowhere differentiable. Everyone took for granted that for granted that a continuous function could only fail differentiability at isolated points until Weierstrass showed otherwise.