The Washington Post, March 13th, 1996
I. The Mystical Triangle Think back to geometry class, and perhaps you can dredge up a sleepy memory of Pythagoras. He's credited with discovering that the square of the longest side of a right-angled triangle -- remember the hypotenuse? -- is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. That factoid is Pythagoras's most visible legacy. You may know it as the Pythagorean Theorem: a2 + b2 = c2. But hardly anyone who uses the formula knows that this mathematician of ancient Greece, who has helped so many of us navigate right triangles and solve a host of practical problems in the re...
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