Lighthearted Thursday

No, no scatology-repressed comments about prisons for kids, politicians *spit*, the Mass Media Podpeople’s Hivemind, Academia Nut Fruitcakes or other typical targets of curmudgeonry today. Just something that never would have been on the Howdy Doodie shows of my childhood, but would have been welcome in my childhood memories anyway, had it been available.

Gee, just seeing Danny Kaye in this lil bit pricked me to recall the song from his 1958 movie, Merry Andrew, “The Sum of the Hypotenuse”.

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle
Is equal to the sum of the squares of two adjacent sides.
You’d not tolerate lettin’ your participle dangle,
So please effect the self-same respect for your geometric slides.

Old Einstein said it,
When he was gettin’ nowhere.
Give him credit,
He was heard to declare:
Eureka!

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle [etc.]

Sure as shootin’,
When problems get in your hair,
Be like Newton
Who was heard to declare:
“Eureka!”

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle [etc.]

The Wright Brothers,
Before they conquered the air,
Like those others,
Orville hollers: “Lookahair,
Wilbur….”

The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle
Is equal to the sum of the squares of two adjacent sides.
You’d not tolerate lettin’ your participle dangle,
So please effect the self-same respect for your geometric slides.

All of which led, inevitably in the age of the web, to this:

“The Pythagorean theorem was an early example of an important fact rediscovered independently and often,” Veljan remarks. Moreover, more than 400 different proofs of the theorem are known today…

The famous Babylonian clay tablet known as Plimpton 322… goes a step further. Dating from the period between 1900 B.C. and 1600 B.C. [perhaps as much as 1,300 years before Pythagoras–ed] , the tablet has columns of numbers that apparently represent what are now called Pythagorean triples.”

(Thank you, Mrs. Heinz–my high school trig/stat teacher–for making these things interesting to me and thanks to Danny Kaye for providing such neat vignettes of playful fun.)

Trackposted to The Virtuous Republic, Nuke Gingrich, Allie is Wired, The World According to Carl, Pirate’s Cove, Global American Discourse, The Pink Flamingo, Cao’s Blog, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, , CORSARI D’ITALIA, Conservative Cat, and The Yankee Sailor, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.