The Magic of Angles

The Magic of Angles

When my daughter asked me how we apply angles in real life, I paused to think before answering her. In many ways, I replied.

From winning games of pool and billiards to designing and constructing a building, from calculating the angles that celestial bodies make to landing airplanes on a runway, the uses of angles in real life are numerous.

I have always loved angles. Their fascinating rules with parallel lines and marvelous formulas with circles, squares, and rectangles of all kinds. All these formulae made calculating angle problems a delight for me in school. They were puzzles I could solve because I knew the inside secrets.

Such as how when two angles are complementary to each other, the sum of both adjacent angles is 90°, and how with supplementary angles, the sum of a pair of adjacent angles equals 180°, how opposite angles in a parallelogram are equal, and how all 3 angles of an equilateral triangle measure 60°, making it an acute triangle.

All these make problem-solving a joy because they have already begun the process of elimination for you. And often, using more of these rules helps you solve your problem faster. The trick is to figure out which ones you can apply.

Look around and see how many real-life examples of angles you can find. I promise you, you will be astounded!

Click here for a quick refresher: https://www.storyofmathematics.com/types-of-angles

Thanks to jean wimmerlin @jwimmerli for making this photo available freely on Unsplash 🎁

Christina Sng for Maths@Singapore

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Author

Christina Sng is a three-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author that finds peace in mathematics and the macabre. Her poetry, fiction, essays, and art appear in Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, Interstellar Flight Magazine, and The Washington Post. Aside from having over 20 years of experience in the field of writing, she also has an extensive background in UX design and IT. Her educational background combined with her interests and neverending curiosity about the world is the perfect recipe to have her tackle fascinating topics about math. She is able to approach the highly logical field of mathematics through an extremely creative lens that sheds new light and exposes new avenues on how it impacts our lives.