calc help pleeeeeeeeeeeeease

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
VG, she was supposed to find the area of the rectangle, not the triangle. And re: definition of a triangle, it's inherently an edge case and the definition is equally useful either way. There's no particular reason to exclude zero-area triangles.

Except that they're not actually triangles? I mean... is every line actually a 0 area 124318924-gon?

[Kuciwalker]

Except that they're not actually triangles?

That argument is circular; if you define triangles such that they can't be zero-area, then a zero-area figure is not a triangle; if you define triangles such that they can have zero area, then a line segment is a triangle.

I mean... is every line actually a 0 area 124318924-gon?

Why not?

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker

Except that they're not actually triangles?

That argument is circular; if you define triangles such that they can't be zero-area, then a zero-area figure is not a triangle; if you define triangles such that they can have zero area, then a line segment is a triangle.

If you define triangles as a figure with three distinct sides, than a line segment isn't a triangle. The defining characteristic of a triangle is the 3 sides. (Or possibly the three angles, you know... given the name.)

[Kuciwalker]

Why distinct?

[Victor Galis]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker
Why distinct?

Well, if you want to call a line a triangle with sides a, b, and c.

a and b are really the same side and c doesn't exist at all. Seems a bit of an odd triangle to me

Furthermore, as c doesn't really exist, the angles between c and a and c and b are undefined, while the angle between a and b is 0 degrees. Doesn't really add up to 180 degrees does it? This "triangle" doesn't show many of the characteristics of triangles.

[Kuciwalker]

Define the angles for c as the limit, so pi/2.

[snoopy369]

As triangle ABC approaches the line C, the angle AC and BC approach 0, and the angle AB approaches 180.

Math has a lot of illogical, essentially meaningless things like this. A straight line is also an N dimensional polygon where N is whatever you like. It's clearly meaningless, but as it technically fulfills the rules, it must be allowed for.

[Kuciwalker]

There's no reason it has to be allowed for - you can rewrite the rules to explicitly exclude the edge cases. It's just that in this particular instance, I don't see any good reason to.