Mystery Triangle Puzzle

copy it, print it and try it

What im trying to say is when you "broke" the triangle in different sections you did not keep the same triangle. All you did was created a polygon with 4 sides, not 3. Where the red 12cm sq triangle meets the purple 5cm sq triangle is the 4th side. obviously it is hard to see when your only talking about .5cm difference, which is not hard to hide from an easily fooled person. Try clicking on the slider bar and go back and forth from the original 32.5cm sq traingle to when you first put in the additional colors. Yea, it's not a big difference but .5 isn't either. Nice trick though! :)

if its so easy, please tell all!

well whn a first seen it it a thought a could explain it but whether am correct u can check lol but whn u divide the triangle up into those specific shapes ul b leavin out the decimals which will add up to the .5 (so i believe) and with those specifc shapes after uv moved thm thy will not change the amount of area covered as thy do not change basically but the shapes are such so tht there will b tht gap left... Am i correct?? i don't kno its what i thought as i watched...

The first triangle has a hypotenuse angle of 21.04 degrees (arc-tan 5/13). The two smaller triangles that are formed by the supposed "breaking up" of this larger triangle have hypotenuse angles of 20.56 (arc-tan 3/8) and 21.8 degrees (arc-tan 2/5).

In other words the larger triangle CANNOT TRULY BE BROKEN UP THE WAY SPECIFIED - the angles don't match.

It is, instead, APPROXIMATELY able to be broken up, but this approximation is sufficiently inaccurate to introduce the "error" that gives rise to the "mystery".

If you work on a false premise that you can "break up" the original triangle as shown then you will end up with false results.