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Pythagorean theorem

Pythagorean theorem

From the course: Preparing for the GMAT

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Pythagorean theorem

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- [Instructor] So, I bet you, if you surveyed 100 people, and you asked them to name a theorem, the most popular answer would be the Pythagorean theorem. So, this is the theorem for a right triangle, showing that the sum of the squares of the legs equals the square of the hypotenuse. So, in this video, we'll talk about exactly what that means. So, if we have a right triangle, here, we'll denote that as it's right angle, and the Pythagorean theorem, if we labeled the two legs as a and b, and the hypotenuse as c, the Pythagorean theorem tells us that the square of a, added to the square of b, equals the square of c. That's pretty abstract, let's view that in action with a real triangle. Let's say that we knew this side was three, and this side was four, for some reason we didn't know this side. Well, we could solve for it. So, we would just do three squared plus four squared equals c squared, so that's nine plus 16 equals c squared, other words, 25 equals c squared. So, if I take the…

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