Saturday, December 02, 2006

Presidential math

This came up in one of my classes for math teachers... James Garfield holds a novel distinction of being the only US President who has authored a proof to the Pythagorean Theorem (you know, square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the legs of a right triangle). What's even cooler is that the proof isn't that tough to understand, it's high-school level geometry. Why isn't this a requirement for the office?

[reading Garfield's bio, I just have to quote this: Garfield was the first ambidextrous president. He could simultaneously write in Latin with one hand, and Ancient Greek with the other. What, were there others?]

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1 Comments:

Blogger Chris said...

Second ambidextrous president? Richard Milhous Nixon.

5:28 PM  

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