Classification of Triangles According to Sides

Triangles Classification can take place based on their sides, which is explained in detail below Sub Topics
y y y

Isosceles Triangle Equilateral Triangle Scalene Triangle

Isosceles Triangle
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Isoceles triangle is a triangle with following properties and as shown in the figure.
y y

The two sides of the isosceless triangles are equal. The angles opposite to the equal sides are equal.

In the above triangle, sides 'a' are equal and angle 'x' are also equal. Hence it is an Isoceles triangle.

Equilateral Triangle
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Equilateral triangle is a triangle with following properties and as shown in the below geometrical figure.
y

All the sides of triangle will be equal.

The angles of triangle will be equal and 60o

In the above triangle, all the sides of triangle denoted by 'a' are equal and angles are equal to 60o. Hence the above geometrical figure represents a equilateral triangle.

Scalene Triangle
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Scalene triangle is a triangle with following properties and as shown in the below geometrical figure.
y y

All the sides of triangle will be unequal. The angles of triangle will be unequal.

In the above triangle, all the sides of triangle denoted by a, b and c are unequal and angles x, y and z are also unequal. Hence the above geometrical figure represents a scalene triangle.

Classification of Triangles According to Angles

Classification of Triangles based on Angles is explained in detail below: (i) If one angle of a triangle is a right angle, then it is called a right angled triangle. Note that the other two angles are acute.

(ii) If all the angles of a triangle are acute, then it is called an acute angled triangle.

(iii) If one angle of a triangle is obtuse, then it is called an obtuse angled triangle. Note that the other two angles are acute.

Ptolemy Biography
Journey To The Center Of The Universe - Earth Astronomy & Geography

Ptolemy
Public Domain Ptolemy (aka Claudius Ptolemaeus, Ptolomaeus, Klaudios Ptolemaios, Ptolemeus) lived in Alexandria, Egypt and has an important role in the history of astronomy and geography. We know very little of Ptolemy's life, including his birth and death dates. Various sources report different years, however, the first observation made by him which we can date exactly was on 26 March 127 while the last was on 2 February 141. Some experts believe his life spanned the years 87 150. During his lifetime, he did much to advance the sciences of astronomy and geography.

We get a few clues about him from his name, Claudius Ptolemy, which is a mixture of the Greek Egyptian 'Ptolemy' and the Roman 'Claudius'. This seems to indicate that he was descended from a Greek family living in Egypt and that he was also a citizen of Rome. This could only have happened as a result of a Roman emperor rewarding one of his ancestors with this favor. Around 1360, Theodore Meliteniotes claimed that Ptolemy was born in Hermiou (Northern Egypt. Alexandria is slightly farther south.) Due to the fact that Meliteniotes lived more than a thousand years after Ptolemy, and there is no corroboration, there is a lot of skepticism. In fact no evidence exists that he ever lived anywhere other than Alexandria. Ptolemy was an astronomer, mathematician and geographer. He classified the Greek geocentric view of the universe, and calculated the apparent motions of the planets, as they were known in his time by synthesizing and extending Hipparchus's system of epicycles and eccentric circles to explain his geocentric theory of the solar system. He used at least 80 epicycles to explain the motions of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets known in his time. This system came to be called the Ptolemaic System and was the center of astronomical beliefs for nearly a millennium and a half. It predicted the positions of the planets accurately enough for naked-eye observations. Ptolemy described his system in his book, Almagest (Also known as Mathematical Syntaxis). It was a thirteen book mathematical explanation of astronomy, containing a wide variety of information. He also included a star catalog that contained 48 constellations, all with the same names still in use today.

The Ptolemaic System was the accepted wisdom until the Polish scholar Copernicus proposed a heliocentric view in 1543. In fairness, Ptolemy's system is actually more accurate than Copernicus's. The heliocentric calculations for the movement of planets does not improve on Ptolemy's until Kepler's Laws were added. Some people also doubt that Ptolemy truly believed his own system, rather he merely used it as a method of calculating positions. Not just an astronomer, Ptolemy was very important in the history of geography and cartography. He was well aware that the Earth is a sphere. His is the first known projection of the sphere onto a plane. His work, "Geography" remained the principal work on the subject until the time of Columbus. It was amazingly accurate for the time, but had Asia extending much too far east. This may have been a deciding factor in Columbus's decision to sail west for the Indies. Menelaus of Alexandria, (flourished 1st century ad, Alexandria and Rome), Greek mathematician and astronomer who first conceived and defined a spherical triangle (a triangle formed by three arcs of great circles on the surface of a sphere). Menelauss most important work is Sphaerica, on the geometry of the sphere, extant only in an Arabic translation. In Book I he established the basis for a mathematical treatment of spherical triangles analogous to Euclids treatment of plane triangles. Furthermore, he originated the use of arcs of great circles instead of arcs of parallel circles on the sphere, a major turning point in the development of spherical trigonometry. Book II established theorems whose principal interest is their (unstated) application to problems in spherical astronomy. Book III, the last, concentrates on spherical trigonometry and introduces Menelauss theorem. The form of this theorem for plane triangles, well known to his contemporaries, was expressed as follows: if the three sides of a triangle are crossed by a straight line (one of the sides is extended beyond its vertices), then the product of three of the nonadjacent line segments thus formed is equal to the product of three

other line segments (see the

figure).

Although Book III contains the first-known extension of Menelauss theorem for spherical triangles, it is quite possible that the theorem was already known and Menelaus simply transmitted it to later generations. In the form stated in Book III, the theorem became of fundamental importance in spherical trigonometry and astronomy, and the theorem has since been known by his name. Other works are attributed to him, including one on setting times of the signs of the zodiac, one (in six books) on chords in a circle, and one (in three books) on elements of geometry, but his only extant work is Sphaerica. Menelaus was not just a theoretical astronomer, as attested by the Almagest where Ptolemy (c. ad 100170) reports Menelauss observations of lunar occultations of stars. Menelaus of Alexandria's life Ptolemy records astronomical observations made by Menelaus in Rome on the 14th January in the year 98. These observation included that of the occultation of the star Beta Scorpii by the moon.

He also makes an appearance in a work by Plutarch who describes a conversation between Menelaus and Lucius in which Lucius apologises to Menelaus for doubting the fact that light, when reflected, obeys the law that the angle of incidence equals the angle of reflection. Lucius says (see for example [1]):In your presence, my dear Menelaus, I am ashamed to confute a mathematical proposition, the foundation, as it were, on which rests the subject of catoptrics. Yet it must be said that the proposition, "All reflection occurs at equal angles" is neither self evident nor an admitted fact. This conversation is supposed to have taken place in Rome probably quite a long time after 75 AD, and indeed if our guess that Menelaus was born in 70 AD is close to being correct then it must have been many years after 75 AD. Very little else is known of Menelaus's life, except that he is called Menelaus of Alexandria by both Pappus and Proclus. All we can deduce from this is that he spent some time in both Rome and Alexandria but the most likely scenario is that he lived in Alexandria as a young man, possibly being born there, and later moved to Rome. An Arab register of mathematicians composed in the 10th century records Menelaus as follows (see [1]):He lived before Ptolemy, since the latter makes mention of him. He composed: "The Book of Spherical Propositions", "On the Knowledge of the Weights and Distribution of Different Bodies" ... Three books on the "Elements of Geometry", edited by Thabit ibn Qurra, and "The Book on the Triangle". Some of these have been translated into Arabic. Of Menelaus's many books only Sphaerica has survived. It deals with spherical triangles and their application to astronomy. He was the first to write down the definition of a spherical triangle giving the definition at the beginning of Book I:A spherical triangle is the space included by arcs of great circles on the surface of a sphere ... these arcs are always less than a semicircle. In Book I of Sphaerica he set up the basis for treating spherical triangles as Euclid treated plane triangles. He used arcs of great circles instead of arcs of parallel circles on the sphere. This marks a turning point in the development of spherical trigonometry. However, Menelaus seems unhappy with the method of proof by reductio ad absurdum which Euclid frequently uses. Menelaus avoids this way of proving theorems and, as a consequence, he gives proofs of some of the theorems where Euclid's proof could be easily adapted to the case of spherical triangles by quite different methods. It is also worth commenting that [3]:In some respects his treatment is more complete than Euclid's treatment of the analogous plane case.

Book 2 applies spherical geometry to astronomy. It largely follows the propositions given by Theodosius in his Sphaerica but Menelaus give considerably better proofs. Book 3 deals with spherical trigonometry and includes Menelaus's theorem. For plane triangles the theorem was known before Menelaus:... if a straight line crosses the three sides of a triangle (one of the sides is extended beyond the vertices of the triangle), then the product of three of the nonadjacent line segments thus formed is equal to the product of the three remaining line segments of the triangle. Menelaus produced a spherical triangle version of this theorem which is today also called Menelaus's Theorem, and it appears as the first proposition in Book III. The statement is given in terms of intersecting great circles on a sphere. Many translations and commentaries of Menelaus Sphaerica were made by the Arabs. Some of these survive but differ considerably and make an accurate reconstruction of the original quite difficult. On the other hand we do know that some of the works are commentaries on earlier commentaries so it is easy to see how the original becomes obscured. There are detailed discussions of these Arabic translations in [6], [9], and [10]. There are other works by Menelaus which are mentioned by Arab authors but which have been lost both in the Greek and in their Arabic translations. We gave a quotation above from the 10th century Arab register which records a book called Elements of Geometry which was in three volumes and was translated into Arabic by Thabit ibn Qurra. It also records another work by Menelaus was entitled Book on Triangles and although this has not survived fragments of an Arabic translation have been found. Proclus referred to a geometrical result of Menelaus which does not appear in the work which has survived and it is thought that it must come from one of the texts just mentioned. This was a direct proof of a theorem in Euclid's Elements and given Menelaus's dislike for reductio ad absurdum in his surviving works this seems a natural line for him to follow. The new proof which Proclus attributes to Menelaus is of the theorem (in Heath's translation of Euclid):If two triangles have the two sides equal to two sides respectively, but have the base of one greater than the base of the other, it will also have the angle contained by the equal straight lines of the first greater than that of the other. Another Arab reference to Menelaus suggests that his Elements of Geometry contained Archytas's solution of the problem of duplicating the cube. Paul Tannery in [8] argues that this make it likely that a curve which it is claimed by Pappus that Menelaus discussed at length was the Viviani's curve of double curvature. Bulmer-Thomas in [1] comments that:It is an attractive conjecture but incapable of proof on present evidence.

Menelaus is believed by a number of Arab writers to have written a text on mechanics. It is claimed that the text studied balances studied by Archimedes and those devised by Menelaus himself. In particular Menelaus was interested in specific gravities and analysing alloys.
Statistics:

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (1890 - 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist. Richard Dawkins described him as "The greatest of Darwin's successors", and the historian of statistics Anders Hald said "Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science".His contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, and likelihood based methods have led some to call him "The Father of Statistics". Sir David R. Cox, born in 1924, is a British statistician who has made pioneering and important contributions to numerous areas of statistics and applied probability. Perhaps the best known of his many developments is the proportional hazards model, which is widely used in the analysis of survival data. He is now an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College and a member of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. Florence Nightingale David (1909 - 1993), a great statistician and a fighter for increasing women's roles in the sciences, began her career as a research assistant in Karl Pearson's laboratory. During World War II, she became an experimental officer and senior statistician for the Research and Experiments Department, and was scientific advisor on mines for the military. David felt that the war gave women more opportunities and that conditions for them are now better because of it. After serving as a lecturer and professor at University College for many years, in 1970 she was offered the chair of statistics at the University of California at Riverside.
Great Statisticians R. A. Fisher

Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher, FRS (1890 - 1962) was an English statistician, evolutionary biologist, and geneticist. Richard Dawkins described him as "The greatest of Darwin's successors", and the historian of statistics Anders Hald said "Fisher was a genius who almost single-handedly created the foundations for modern statistical science".His contributions to experimental design, analysis of variance, and likelihood based methods have led some to call him "The Father of Statistics".
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Karl Pearson

Karl Pearson (1857 - 1936) was a major contributor to the early development of statistics, and founder of the world's first university statistics department at University College London in 1911. He was also an ardent and controversial proponent of eugenics. His most famous contribution is the Pearson's chi-square test.
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Gertrude Cox

Gertrude Mary Cox (1900 - 1978) was an influential American statistician and founder of the department of Experimental Statistics at North Carolina State University. She was later appointed director of both the Institute of Statistics of the Consolidated University of North Carolina and the Statistics Research Division of North Carolina State University. Her most important and influential research dealt with experimental design; she wrote an important book on the subject with W. G. Cochran. In 1949 Cox became the first female elected into the International Statistical Institute and in 1956 she was president of the American Statistical Association.
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Frank Yates

Frank Yates (1902 - 1994) was one of the pioneers of 20th century statistics. He worked on the design of experiments, including contributions to the theory of analysis of variance and originating Yates' algorithm and the balanced incomplete block design. He became an enthusiast of electronic computers, in 1954 obtaining an Elliott 401 for Rothamsted and contributing to the initial development of statistical computing.
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Kirstine Smith

Kirstine Smith (1878 - 1939) was born in Denmark. She was admitted as a candidate for a doctorate in statistics in 1916 at the University of London and wrote a thesis that was a precursor to modern optimal design theory, published in 1918 Biometrika. Karl Pearson considered her to be one of his most brilliant mathematical statisticians. Her work with Pearson on minimum chi-square spurred a controversial dialog between Pearson and Fisher, and led to Fishers introduction of sufficient statistics. She returned to teaching in Denmark and ended her career there.
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John Tukey

John Wilder Tukey (1915 - 2000) was a professor of Statistics at Princeton University. A mathematician by training, his statistical interests were many and varied. He contributed significantly to what is today known as the jackknife procedure. He introduced the box plot in his 1977 book, Exploratory Data Analysis.He also contributed to statistical practice and articulated the important distinction between exploratory data analysis and confirmatory data analysis, believing that much statistical methodology placed too great an emphasis on the latter. .
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Student (William Sealy Gosset)

William Sealy Gosset (1876 - 1937) was a chemist and statistician, better known by his pen name Student. He worked in a beer brewery and his testing of very small patches led him to discover certain small-sample distributions.This led to the development of Student's t-Test. His communications with Fisher on the subject are legendary.
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George E. P. Box

George Edward Pelham Box, born on October 18, 1919, was a pioneer in the areas of quality control, time series analysis, and design of experiments. Still on the engineering faculty of University of Wisconsin, he is well-known for the quote all models are wrong, but some are useful. His books Statistics for Experimenters and Time Series Analysis: Forecasting and Control are classic texts. Note: The above is an excerpt from Wikipedia. Click here to learn more.
David R. Cox

Sir David R. Cox, born in 1924, is a British statistician who has made pioneering and important contributions to numerous areas of statistics and applied probability. Perhaps the best known of his many developments is the proportional hazards model, which is widely used in the analysis of survival data. He is now an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College and a member of the Department of Statistics at the University of Oxford. Note: The above is an excerpt from Wikipedia. Click here to learn more.
Jerome H. Friedman

Jerome H. Friedman is one of the world's leading researchers in statistical data mining. He has been a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University for nearly 20 years and has published on a wide range of data mining topics including nearest neighbor classification, logistic regression, and high-dimensional data analysis, and machine learning. Note: The above is an excerpt from Stanford University. Click here to learn more.
Bradley Efron

Professor Efron is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, president of the American Statistical Association, recipient of the MacArthur Prize, and winner of the Wilks Medal of the American Statistical Association. Professor Efron is renowned internationally for his pioneering work in computationally intensive statistical methods, particularly the bootstrap method and the biased coin design. He is still a very active researcher, having worked more recently in statistical genetics.

Note: The above is an excerpt from Stanford University. Click here to learn more.
F. N. David

Florence Nightingale David (1909 1993), a great statistician and a fighter for increasing womens roles in the sciences, began her career as a research assistant in Karl Pearsons laboratory. During World War II, she became an experimental officer and senior statistician for the Research and Experiments Department, and was scientific advisor on mines for the military. David felt that the war gave women more opportunities and that conditions for them are now better because of it. After serving as a lecturer and professor at University College for many years, in 1970 she was offered the chair of statistics at the University of California at Riverside.