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What? "The longest side of a triangle" isn't a challenging concept to understand or describe.





(from the nearby toilet cubicle) "That's a right triangle, ya idiot!"

D'oh!

[remarkably incorrect answer misunderstanding the above comments]

Who are you talking about? The entire claim was "there was no reasonable description for hypotenuse length before the theorem"; I assume the Pythagorean theorem is intended. But that claim is crazy. You just contradicted it yourself.

I should note that hypotenuses look no different in 126 dimensions than they do in 2 - three points determine a plane, regardless of how big the space containing the plane might be - but that's not really relevant to anything here.


Sorry, yes, that was a major misunderstanding of the previous comment by me. I am utterly wrong!

(The longest side of a right triangle)

If you believe that you can only subtend a 90 degree angle, sure.

("Subtend" is a direct part-for-part translation of the verb which also gives us the name "hypotenuse".)




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