My favorite elementary geometry proof

My favorite elementary geometry proof is that medians divide a triangle into 6 triangles having equal area.

I’m a tiny bit disappointed that our Geometry book covers this theorem before it covers Ceva’s theorem because having to assume that the medians intersect in a single point is a bit of a shame. No matter, though, I’ve always found it amazing that you can prove this nice fact just from the area formula for a triangle. It is a really nice example of mathematical ideas for kids.

I broke the proof into three parts of about 3 minutes each. Not much commentary is necessary as the proof really stands on its own. This sequence shows another example of why I love talking about math with my kids.



Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s