Thales's theorem theorem is named after Thales because he was said by ancient sources to have been the first to prove the theorem, using his own results that the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal, and that the sum of angles in a triangle is equal to 180°. Dante's "Paradiso" (canto 13, lines 101–102) refers to Thales's theorem in the course of a speech. The following facts are used: the sum of the angles in a triangle is equal to 180° and the base angles of an isosceles triangle are equal. Since = = , ∆OBA and ∆OBC are isosceles
Degrees of freedom (statistics) degrees of freedom. In some complicated settings, such as unbalanced split-plot designs, the sums-of-squares no longer have scaled chi-squared distributions. Comparison of sum-of-squares with degrees-of-freedom is no longer meaningful, and software may report certain fractional 'degrees of freedom' in these cases. Such numbers have no genuine degrees-of-freedom interpretation, but are simply providing an "approximate" chi-squared distribution for the corresponding sum-of-squares. The details of such approximations are beyond the scope of this page. Several commonly encountered statistical distributions (Student's t, Chi-Squared, F) have parameters that are commonly referred to as "degrees of freedom". This terminology simply reflects that in many applications