Is this a triangle?
Is this a triangle?
I would have asked this on a math community but I couldn't find an active one.
In a spherical geometry, great circles are "straight lines". As such, a triangle can have two or even three right angles to it.
But what if you go the long way around the back of the sphere? Is that still a triangle?
(Edit:) I guess it's a triangle! Fair enough; I can't think of what else you would call it. Thanks, everyone.
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Two things I need to ask:
- What inspired this question, exactly, and
- Can I have some, please?
I was reading Matt Parker's new trigonometry book and they made some remark about triangles in spherical geometry and I went "wait, what if you did this"
There's a theory about Alice in Wonderland that Lewis Carroll was satirizing the absurdity of the increasingly abstract mathematics that was popping up at the time. Now, I don't think that theory holds weight--Alice in Wonderland doesn't need to be anything other than a whimsical children's book--but he did apparently write some things along those lines. This post is a pretty good example of something that would throw him into a rage.