Allegedly 2000 years after the Great Pyramid at Giza was created, Thales, a Greek philosopher visited.

While there, he wanted to know how tall the pyramid was, but no one could tell him. So he decided to
use similar triangles to measure and figure out the height himself. Apparently, he used a shadow of
either a stick or himself, along with the shadow of the pyramid at the same time of the day to calculate
this. By doing so he was using similar triangles. Similar triangles are those that have sides that are in
proportion. You usually know majority of the smaller triangle, and at least one of the lengths of the
larger which is the hypotenuse.

An example would be, let us say you want to show off your cool math skills to your friends and find a
tower. You want to tell them how tall it is. We will say you have a stick that is 5’ tall. We will use Thales
way with shadows. You wait until say 3pm and see the shadow of the tower, you walk over with your
stick and basically line up the sticks shadow with the tower. Next you measure, stick’s shadow let us say
is 10’ long, tower’s shadow is 30’ long. So now you have the measurements of one triangle. So, we can
use these numbers to find the tower’s height using scale factor. So:

Scale factor = 30/10 = 3

Height = 5’ (the stick, remember) * 3

Height = 15’

Now you can tell your friends the tower you are at is 15 feet tall.
Now with the next part about right angles, it’s always good to use the Pythagorean theorem. The
Pythagorean theorem is that a square of an hypotenuse is always equal to the sum of the squares on the
other two sides, with the equation of a 2+b2+c2. So long as you can determine any of the other angles,
you’ll be able to find the last unless they’re all given to you which would be easier. Again, angles need to
add up to 180º. So we will use the example above to figure out the shadow’s hypotenuse.

H=√(15)2+(30)2

H=√225+900

H=33.54

References

Abramson, J. P. (2017). Algebra and trigonometry. Houston, TX: OpenStax.

Thales of Miletus. (n.d.). Retrieved March 14, 2021, from

http://sporkjs.github.io/m142/assignments/history/math.html