One of the most interesting proofs is due to Hermite; it arose as a byproduct of his proof of the transcendence of e in [5]. (See [6] for an exposition by Olds.) The purpose of this note is to present an especially short and direct variant of Hermite’s proof and to explain some of the motivation behind it. Consider any continued fraction [a0, a1, a2, . . .]. Its ith convergent is defined to be ...