I recently got to thinking about shapes. The curvy comfort of circles, and the calm, assured symmetry of squares and rectangles. The least comforting shape, though, was the triangle. Any way you hold it, you're not wholly comfortable. It pokes and shoves. Too many angles, students complain. Take the square- 90 degrees all the way. What's it with all these weird three sided things? They go this way and that- flat out and squat- and one obviously gets confused.
Save for all the complaints, the triangle is incredibly useful. In what?, you ask.
How about nachos? And the musical instrument, also called the triangle?
They are increasingly used in architecture, especially in bridges, and trigonometry is all about triangles, so, so incredibly important that even their peculiar shape shouldn't distract us.
So we'll talk more about this in today's post.
I assume you know how to differentiate between scalene, isosceles and equilateral types. If you have trouble with that, don't hesitate to ask, but for right now, we shall be moving on.
Let's talk about congruence. What is it, pray?
Congruence is nothing but the concept of things being the same shape and the same size. If there were two , lets go back to our famed doughnuts, chocolate doughnuts exactly the same size, and shape, they'd be called congruent in mathematical terms. Of course, we'd just call them delicious in real life though!
If there were two of you, like you and a clone of yours, wearing the same clothes, shoes, everything, you'd be called congruent, both of you.
Two objects are congruent if they are EXACT copies of one another. EXACT in bold. If your clone were wearing pink and you were wearing green, you wouldn't be congruent.
What we're primarily interested in now is the congruence of triangles.
No comments:
Post a Comment