this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

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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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

Spherical geometry - good times...

Yep, it's a triangle. You can also make one with three right angles on a sphere!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Cowboy hat, maybe?

Edit: No, more like a Mountie hat.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

It is a triangle. The abstraction of lines in non-Euclidean geometry are geodesics and just like three lines form a triangle, so do the geodesics. If you walked along the earth's surface from the equator to the North Pole and back, taking 90 degrees angles every time, you will have felt that you made a triangle by walking straight in three directions.

The reason the angle sum can be more than 180 degrees is that the sphere has a positive curvature. If you want one with negative curvature and less than 180 degrees angle sum, try to make one on the side of the hole on a torus (look up its curvature if my explanation was lacking).

EDIT: Picture for reference:

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Two things I need to ask:

  • What inspired this question, exactly, and
  • Can I have some, please?
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

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"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

It’s a bowl cut with a part down the middle, so no.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Well technically a line isnt a curve or vice versa. A possible projection of this 3d shape onto a 2D plane is a triangle, though, yes.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago

Just noticed in euclidean geometry, for any two line segments touching at a point there is exactly one triangle you can draw, i.e. a triangle is uniquely described by any two of its legs. In spherical geometry, there are two choices for the third leg!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

Yes and I hate it >:(

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Congratulations you just invented magenta

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Its a pyramid

[–] [email protected] 114 points 1 week ago (1 children)

This is an example of non-Euclidean geometry. In this non-Euclidean space, it is a triangle.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I am pleased to see that there is a section on Lovecraft in that article. He really loved his non-Euclidian geometry

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

as well as being really aggressively racist

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 week ago

Don't worry. Give it half a millenium and we all will have been racist against dogs.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

What does that have to do with non-Euclidean geometry?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

This inevitably comes up every time he is mentioned. Yes, he was very racist, even for the time. That mainly came forth from the fact that he was a very socially disturbed and scared person. Which isn't an excuse, nu i think we should be able to appreciate the amazing writing and the influence he has had on the literary (horror) landscape without just focusing on the fact that he was racist.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago

There’s an entire field of science projecting shapes from the surface of a sphere onto a planar surface going back centuries.

Suffice it to say, I don’t know you’d have to talk to a map-nerd.

[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 week ago

The wonders of non-Euclidian geometry. Yes, this is a triangle, but as it exists in a non-Euclidian space, some rules you learned about in school which mostly teach Euclidian geometry, don't apply.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Would the southern shape here also qualify as a triangle?

What if you went the short way instead of the long way, creating the spherical triangle people usually use - then is the "outside" portion of the triangle itself another triangle?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago

Yes, that would be a different triangle. If you have 3 points on a sphere, there are multiple triangles that contain them as vertices.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

I didn't even think of that. Another good question!

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