Triangle inequality is an exterior angle of a right triangle and therefore larger than , meaning the other base angle of the isosceles triangle also is greater than and their sum exceeds in violation of the triangle postulate). This theorem establishing inequalities is sharpened by Pythagoras' theorem to the equality that the square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Consider a triangle whose sides are in an arithmetic progression and let the sides be , , . Then the triangle inequality requires that The first of these quadratic inequalities requires to
Fermat's right triangle theorem that the numbers to be squared are the difference of legs, hypotenuse, and sum of legs of a Pythagorean triangle, and that the congruum is four times the area of the same triangle. In his later work on the congruum problem, published in "The Book of Squares", Fibonacci observed that it is impossible for a congruum to be a square number itself, but did not present a satisfactory proof of this fact. If three squares formula_4, formula_5, and formula_6 could form an arithmetic progression whose congruum was also a square formula_7, then these numbers would satisfy the Diophantine equations That