Carrying Out the Plan

The next step is to execute the plan we made in the last lesson. We have to use the right-angle triangles to find the length of the cross wire. We can solve this problem using the Pythagorean theorem.

Applying the solution

First, we must solve for the length of $d$ on side 1 by applying the Pythagoras’ theorem:

$$\begin{align*} d^2 &= a^2 + c^2 \\ d &= \sqrt{a^2 + c^2} \end{align*}$$ ...