Hypotenuse Quotes

As long as he could whisper, he would go on as he had begun, bluntly refusing to meet his creator with the admission that the creation had taught him nothing except that the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle might for convenience be taken as equal to something else. Every man with self-respect enough to become effective, if only as a machine, has had to account to himself for himself somehow, and to invent a formula of his own for his universe, if the standard formulas failed. (Henry Adams)
The classic instrument to measure drawn angles and to draw angles of a given measure is the protractor - essentially half a circular ring, subdivided by ray segments into 180 degrees. For reasons I was unable to find out, this instrument has recently been superseded by an isosceles right triangle - called geo-triangle, solid, transparant, made of plastic - with an angular division radiating from the midpoint of the hypotenuse to the other sides. Well, inside the triangle half a circle with the midpoint of the hypotenuse as its centre is indicated, and from the position of the degree numbers it becomes clear that it is the semicircle that really matters. One is inclined to say "an outrageously misleading instrument"... View quote
Hans Freudenthal