Most of us are familiar with Pythagoras’s prized Theorem…

a² + b² = c²

Some poor souls amoung you might even remember having to learn a long winded proof starting along the lines of “Let a be equal to blah and b equal blah…”

Here is an ancient Chinese proof without words.

It may not be imidiatly obvious but if you look at the image below, you can see that the squares within the left square must have the same area as the square with the right square. The area of the square with sides “a” plus the area of the square with sides “b” equals the area of the square with sides “c”.

This is where working visually in mathematics instead of with cryptic letters and symbols can have great cognitave advantages.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Generative Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.