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Published 1997 Revised 2011
This is the second of the two articles on right-angled triangles whose edge lengths are whole numbers. We suppose that the lengths of the two sides of a right-angled triangles are $a$ and $b$, and that the hypotenuse has length $c$ so that, by Pythagoras' Theorem,$$a^2 + b^2 = c^2$$.
In the first article we discussed the possibility of enlarging or shrinking a right-angled triangle to get another right-angled triangle whose sides also have lengths that are whole numbers, and we claimed there that apart from a possible scaling of the triangle, every such right-angled triangle has edge lengths of the form
$a=2pq \; \; \;$ | $b=p^2-q^2 \; \; \;$ |
$c=p^2+q^2$
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