Mystical Angels

My research paper.....good or bad?

Pythagorean Theorem Pythagoras (569-500 B.C.E.) was born on the island of Samos in Greece, and did much traveling through Egypt, learning, among other things, mathematics. Not much more is known of his early years. Pythagoras gained his famous status by founding a group, the Brotherhood of Pythagoreans, which was devoted to the study of mathematics. The group was almost cult-like in that it had symbols, rituals and prayers. In addition, Pythagoras believed that "Number rules the universe,” and the Pythagoreans gave numerical values to many objects and ideas. These numerical values, in turn, were endowed with mystical and spiritual qualities. Legend has it that upon completion of his famous theorem, Pythagoras sacrificed 100 oxen. Although he is credited with the discovery of the famous theorem, it is not possible to tell if Pythagoras is the actual author. The Pythagoreans wrote many geometric proofs, but it is difficult to ascertain who proved what, as the group wanted to keep their findings secret. Unfortunately, this vow of secrecy prevented an important mathematical idea from being made public. The Pythagoreans had discovered irrational numbers! If we take an isosceles right triangle with legs of measure 1, the hypotenuse will measure sqrt 2. But this number cannot be expressed as a length that can be measured with a ruler divided into fractional parts, and that deeply disturbed the Pythagoreans, who believed that "All is number." They called these numbers "alogon," which means "unutterable." So shocked were the Pythagoreans by these numbers, they put to death a member who dared to mention their existence to the public. It would be 200 years later that the Greek mathematician Eudoxus developed a way to deal with these unutterable numbers. How to use the Pythagorean theorem in real life? Well you can use it in Air Force, if you’re a weatherman. When the clouds were relatively low, you used a high intensity light (like an aircraft landing light) to find the exact height. You set the light 500 feet away and turned it on. You could see where it hit the clouds fairly easily. Then you had a protractor connected to a small telescope. You looked at where the light hit the cloud and a string hanging from the center of the protractor told you what the angle was that we were looking at. By using trig you could find how high the cloud was and how far away it was. Using Pythagorean theorem we you could check your work. A little more about Pythagorean Theorem back when Pythagoras solved this himself, there were no traditional measures or rules and him and his mathematical society came up with it after seeing that the 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 which they were able to prove easily, from there this theorem was formulated. And here for further understanding of Pythagorean Theorem. Pythagorean is (a squared) + (b squared) = (c squared). When in a right triangle, C is the hypotenuse, which is the longest side of the triangle that is opposite the right angle. So this equation is used to find the different sides of the triangle. A and B are the other two sides, just for the information. So if a triangle’s two non-hypotenuse sides were 3 and 4, you could plug them in like this: (3 squared) + (4 squared) = (c squared) 9 + 1 = c^2 25 = c^2 And 5 would be your answer! J Block 4 December 10, 2008

Public Comments

1. I read the half of it and its good ! but if u wanna more and better go to this link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_theorem