45°- 45°- 90° Triangle
Try this In the figure below, drag the orange dots on each
vertex to reshape the triangle.
Note how the angles remain the same, and it maintains the same proportions between its sides.
This is one of the 'standard' triangles you should be able recognize on sight. A fact you should commit to memory is:
With the being the hypotenuse (longest side).
This can be derived from
Pythagoras' Theorem.
This ratio will come in handy later in the study of trigonometry. In the figure above, as you drag the vertices
of the triangle to resize it, the angles remain fixed and the sides remain in this ratio.
Because the base angles are the same (both 45°) the two legs are equal and so the triangle is also isosceles
Area of a 45-45-90 triangle
As you see from the figure above, two 45-45-90 triangles together make a square, so the area of one of them is half the area of the square.
As a formula
where
S is the length of either short side
Other triangle topics
General
Perimeter / Area
Triangle types
Triangle centers
Congruence and Similarity
Solving triangles
Triangle quizzes and exercises
(C) 2011 Copyright Math Open Reference.
All rights reserved