Assignment #1 Reflection

In the first assignment, my group was tasked with solving a problem related to Pythagorean Triples and learning the history of the concept. I had been introduced to the idea of Pythagorean Triples in my secondary school mathematics classes, but never really explored too deeply into the concept. What was most interesting to me while completing this project is how sophisticated this idea is. Going back to the 1800s in Mesopotamia, a tablet from that time shows the Babylonian's familiarity with the Pythagorean Triples concept. Noting that there is an infinite number of Pythagorean Triples, I see this as a particularly impressive development.

Through the process of solving the given problem, I found that my group and I took a quite unconventional approach. We took the Pythagorean Triple form: 3n, 4n, 5n or 5n, 12n, 13n...etc. and applied this to the given variable, for example, x = 100. So, if 4n = 100, then, n = 25. Applying this 25 to the rest of the Pythagorean Triple: 3n and 5n, we get 75 and 125, which would equal the remaining two variables y and z, respectively. We were not sure if this was the most efficient way to solve this problem, but we found it to be effective. I'd say we needed to think outside the box and manipulate the concept to arrive at a solution to our problem. Although the concept of Pythagorean Triples is quite simple to understand from a surface level, I found that through this process I built a much better understanding of the theory as we needed to test ourselves by apply a unique perspective to the concept.