There is irony in mathematician Conway’s death by coronavirus, whose invention ‘Game of Life’ involved gliders, mutation, movement and death John Conway seems to have had fun with right-angled triangles, or at least one right-angled triangle.
Such triangles, as you perhaps know, are fodder for Pythagoras’ famous Theorem, which says that if you add the squares of the two sides forming the right angle, you get the square of the hypotenuse, the side opposite the right angle.
Or, if we call the three sides a, b and c (the hypotenuse): a2 + b2= c2 So anyway, Conway was once playing with the right angle triangle whose sides are 1, 2 and the square root of 5. (Check: 12 + 22 = 1 + 4 = 5 = (Ö5)2.) He discovered that he could cut the triangle into