Pythagorean+Theorem+By+Monica+Paniagua

 More than 4000 years ago, the Babyloneans and the Chinese already knew that a triangle with the sides of 3, 4 and 5 must be a right triangle. The used this knowledge to construct right angles. By dividing a string into twelve equal pieces and then laying it into a triangle so that one side is three, the second side four and the last side five sections long, they could easily construct a right angle. A Greek scholar named Pythagoras, who lived around 500 BC, was also fascinated by triangles with these special side ratios. He studied them a bit closer and found that the two shorter sides of the triangles squared and then added together, equal exactly the square of the longest side. And he proved that this doesn't only work for the special triangles, but for any right triangle. Today we would write it somehow like this: a2 + b2= c2. In the time of Pythagoras they didn't use letters yet to replace variables. Instead, they wrote it down in words.

