Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Fun With The Pythagorean Theorem

A few months ago I had a post about “You Should Get More of These” and I was talking about hinges. They let you build right triangles as shown in the picture below.



On my robot I am building now I need to make some cross braces and diagonal braces work best. I started tinkering around with the Pythagorean Theorem a bit to find a brace that would fit. I was hoping to find a brace length that would be close and if I had to “stretch” the braces a bit, I was fine with it. I created a large Excel spreadsheet using all the “A” and “B” lengths up to 50 and calculated the “C” length. I was surprised to learn that there are tons of right triangle combinations where the “C” length comes out to a whole number.

And of course you can use multiples of the numbers above such as a 6-8-10 triangle or a 10-24-26 triangle.  These numbers allow you to use even numbers when selecting a brace.  This is a piece of information that I will keep handy in the future.

OK, maybe it wasn’t THAT much fun.

3 comments:

  1. Hate to say this, but you've only got two 'right triangles' in your picture. The far right one is an equilateral triangle. You're really lucky that I am not letting me 6 year old loose on you ...

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  2. You are right. I just got lazy and pulled a picture from a previous post but I couldn't find one that had only right triangles.

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  3. Hmm..That's good article i think,we can knowing more about math..

    ReplyDelete