Lesson Objective

The objective of this lesson is for you to figure out the Pythagorean Theorem -- an important relationship between the three sides of a right triangle.

The lesson starts with a couple of pages that review all the essentials you need to know. This review is followed by five pages that give you hints to be able to discover the relationship. Some of the hints are based on applets¹ that you will use. Others use geometrical figures. On each of the hints' pages you will be able to click on an icon to check if you derived the formula correctly relating the three sides of the right triangle. A template page with the figures used in three of the hints' is provided. You can print it out, cut out the figures, and follow the instructions with physical figures.

Towards the end of the lesson (and hopefully once you've figured out the right answer), you'll be able to compare your results against all the other students that have gone through the lesson. The lesson concludes with a section that gives some historical information and examples about this theorem, one of the most important and fundamental theorems in all of mathematics.

[Note 1] -- A Java applet is simply a computer program written in the Java computer language. One of the good features of a program written in Java is that it can be downloaded from the web and run on almost any computer.