Yesterday’s Thanksgiving Dinner conversation found its way into the topic of geometry – specifically the calculation of the Earth’s circumference by Eratosthenes. Inspired by this example of geometry, in a spare moment I decided to create a interactive illustration to allow one to get a hand’s-on experience for the Pythagorean Theorem.

In the attached VSD file, you’ll see a simply drawing with several shapes. It isn’t a static picture – as you resize the triangle in the middle the squares of the sides and the square of the hypotenuse will resize accordingly.

Download the Visio file:  Interactive-Pythagorean-Theorem-(2008-11-28).vsd

For example if you select the triangle …

And then resize it …

You’ll see the squares adjust automatically.

The red-dots are shapes I used to store some intermediate calculations.