Thursday, March 13, 2008

Mary's Scribe

The Pythagorean Theorem


Today in math class, we learned what the pythagorean theorem was all about. It states that the legs (a and b) and the hypotenuse ( c) obey the following relations a2+b2=c2 . We were also taught of what a pythagorean theorem was . It's A squared + B Squared = C Squared and it uses perfect square numbers, as shown in the picture below .


Mr. Jay also gave us a problem that we had to solve. The problem was "The egyptians used a rope with 12 knots that were evenly spread apart to make right angles. They knew that the angle opposite the longest side was always square." We were asked to make a right angle triangle with 12 knots . This is what we did .


We also started another flap, and called it PROOF NUMBER ONE . Under this, we cut out dotted paper, with the areas of 3 squared, 4 squared and 5 squared, and arranged them into a pythagorean triple. This proved our statement .


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