April 23, 2013
To be able to guarantee a right angle corner on a plot of land or a building using a triangle of sides
3 units, by 4 units, a 5 units works. Ancient Egyptians seemed to know that
If you use units twice as long as the original that shows that
6,8,10
also would be a right triangle.
Checking with the Pythagorean theorem shows
the sum of the squares of 6 and 8 does equal 10 squared.
9, 12, 15 works for making a right angle triangle.
There are many triangles that we made that looked close to right angles but did not exactly work.
It is remarkable that people knew some of them a long time ago.
Example
Right Angles
