Why does President Garfields proof of the Pythagorean Theorem WORK?
President Bush in his recent paper to the royal society of maths has shown that Garfield’s ‘proof’ is in fact a special case of the Pythagoras/Euclid original. If you transpose the reflected Garfield trapezoid on top of itself, you get a square within a square.This results in 4 congruent triangles outside the inner square. If the big square has area=(x+y)^2 and is made up of 4 triangles +inner square, then,(visualize it!) (x+y)^2=4*(xy/2)+z^2 where z= inner square side > x^2+y^2+2xy=2xy+z^2..> x^2+y^2=z^2 Garfield was so clever they had to shoot him!
