Measuring Triangles
Back in high school, I felt that half the stuff that I learned past basic math was pretty much pointless. It was drilled into me that I would end up using this knowledge when I got a job. I couldn’t imagine how.
Computer related jobs were the answer to most questions regarding where that knowledge would be used. Today I program with computers, and I’m pretty good at it. Actually, I had been programming since I was 12. Still, I couldn’t figure out where I would use the knowledge half the time and just made assumptions.
Within the past week, I have been creating a six-sided building in a virtual world called Second Life. The features available to me could only assist me so far. I had to judge with my eyes to get things done until they looked about rite. A week has passed and my mistake has started to come back to haunt me. Things are just not lining up.
The result of everyting is based on a few triangles that I didn’t set the proper measurements for. It’s so simple, really. I had to go back and figure out how to get those measurements. I knew the length of 10 meters at one side, and an angle of 60 degrees for the side opposite of it. I remembered that there were special formulas for it, but I just didn’t know what those were.
The one thing that I did remember was that the sum of all angles of a triangle always equal 180 degrees. So now, I had some notes with a triangle drawn having 10 meters at its base, and 60 degree angles. Well, all the angles were the same so I could assume that all sides would be 10 meters, but I needed the height of that triangle. Splitting the triangle in half yeilded me with angles of 60, 90, 30 and lenths of 5 and 10 meters. Good - a right triangle. I knew there was a special formula for this one. I found on the internet that the formula and started to get to work:
- a2 + b2 = c2
- 52 + b2 = 102
- 25 + b2 = 100
- b2 = 75
Now came the hard part. How do you figure out the square root for a number that doesn’t return a whole number? I ended up finding a web page that would calculate the square root for me as 8.660254037844387.
So I found out how to do all the grunt work of comming up with measurements for my triangles. I figured there must be an easier way at this. I found a triangle calculator that did just the trick.
It is so easy to find things on the internet to assist you in math (or any subject for that matter). Last year I learned some trigonometry on my own and made a simulation of our solar system with JavaScript. I don’t know how todays schools are working, but I do hope that they have some classes instructing students how to use the internet to find the knowledge that they need.