Trigonometry of a tetrahedron Clearly the sum of the angles of any side of the tetrahedron must be 180°. Since there are four such triangles, there are four such constraints on sums of angles, and the number of degrees of freedom is thereby reduced from 12 to 8. The four relations given by the sine law further reduce the number of degrees of freedom, from 8 down to not 4 but 5, since the fourth constraint is not independent of the first three. Thus the space of all shapes of tetrahedra is 5-dimensional. See: Law of sines The law of cosines for the tetrahedron
Sum of angles of a triangle The relation between angular defect and the triangle's area was first proven by Johann Heinrich Lambert. One can easily see how hyperbolic geometry breaks Playfair's axiom, Proclus' axiom (the parallelism, defined as non-intersection, is intransitive in an hyperbolic plane), the equidistance postulate (the points on one side of, and equidistant from, a given line do not form a line), and Pythagoras' theorem. A circle cannot have arbitrarily small curvature, so the three points property also fails. The sum of the angles can be arbitrarily small (but positive). For an ideal triangle, a generalization of hyperbolic triangles, this sum is equal