You see, about a thousand years before the Greek astronomers were looking at the night sky. You've got Babylonian surveyors who have their own unique understanding of right triangles and rectangles, and they're using it.
They all came up with elegant proofs for the famous Pythagorean theorem; the rule that says for a right triangle, the square of one side plus the square of the other side is equal to the square of the hypotenuse.
But how do we know that the theorem is true for every right triangle on a flat surface, not just the ones these mathematicians and surveyors knew about?
This proof divides one right triangle into two others and uses the principle that if the corresponding angles of two triangles are the same, the ratio of their sides is the same, too.
And if you'd really like to convince yourself, you could build a turntable with three square boxes of equal depth connected to each other around a right triangle.
They all came up with elegant proofs for the famous Pythagorean theorem, the rule that says for a right triangle, the square of one side plus the square of the other side is equal to the square of the hypotenuse.
And so what they thought, and this is what the ancient historians described, is that they effectively tried to draw a right angle triangle with the two entrances at each end of the hypotenuse.
Trigonometry -- which we use to calculate the angles and sides of triangles -- is going to come up a lot in physics, because we'll be using right angle triangles all the time.
His musics, his trigon, his golden thigh: Pythagorean theories about music and numerology, the Pythagorean theorem about right triangles, and the myth that Pythagoras had a golden thigh are glanced here.