Pythagoras triangle the square of the hypotenuse is equal [to the sum of] the squares of the two other sides"—that is, formula_1. According to a popular legend, after he discovered this theorem, Pythagoras sacrificed an ox, or possibly even a whole "hecatomb", to the gods. Cicero rejected this story as spurious because of the much more widely held belief that Pythagoras forbade blood sacrifices. Porphyry attempted to explain the story by asserting that the ox was actually made of dough. The Pythagorean theorem was known and used by the Babylonians and Indians centuries before Pythagoras, but it is possible that he
Viviani's theorem Viviani's theorem Viviani's theorem, named after Vincenzo Viviani, states that the sum of the distances from "any" interior point to the sides of an equilateral triangle equals the length of the triangle's altitude. This proof depends on the readily-proved proposition that the area of a triangle is half its base times its height—that is, half the product of one side with the altitude from that side. Let ABC be an equilateral triangle whose height is "h" and whose side is "a". Let P be any point inside the triangle, and "u, s, t" the distances of P from the sides.