Visual Pythagoras
Reading Edward Tufte’s “Envisioning Information“, I came across a simple graphic, originally published in the Chinese mathematics treatise Zhou Bi Suan Jing (or Chou Pei Suan Ching) that impressed with its simplicity. It’s a visual, geometric way of proving the Pythogorean Theorem that was published around 2,000 years ago. If you compare it with Euclid’s proof, this picture is worth about 500 words.
Any mathematicians out there know that there are many ways to prove the theorem attributed to Pythogoras – I like the simple elegance of this one. Here’s my redrawing of the Chinese original.
Tags: chou pei suan ching, pythagorean theorem, pythogoras, visual proof, zhou bi suan jing
This entry was posted on Friday, June 24th, 2011 at 5:24 pm and is filed under Data Visualization, Information Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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