The Pythagorean Theorem Animation October 31, 2012

I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I had never realized that the Pythagorean Theorem’s a^2 + b^2 = c^2 actually meant “the area of the square made by the side length C is the same as the sum of the areas made by the squares made of the other two sides’ side lengths” until I was in graduate school.  When I saw it for the first time in Professor Oliver Knill’s class, aside from his animation being totally bad ass, I was totally blown away by the realization of what I had never realized.

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So here are some animations, starting with Oliver’s, that show how awesomely dynamic Pythagoras’s theorem is:

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Was math discovered or invented? March 14, 2011

On this Pi Day in 2011, I find myself wondering if math was discovered or invented.   The Pythagoreans believed that math was discovered and that whole numbers ruled the universe.  They also did not believe in irrational numbers, of which we now know there are an infinite amount.  So then was math invented?  I’m not sure….

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