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Cute little math trick

#1 User is online   hrothgar 

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Posted 2009-June-19, 05:48

So, I'm sitting at work yesterday and one of our users needs an easy way to calculate the area of a trapezoid.

I still and think about things and come up with a decent enough solution using my old high school algebra.

I post the solution.
10 minutes later one of our developers comes back and replaced the entire function with less than a single line of code

Apparantly I forgot that the vector area of a quadrilateral is one half the cross product of the diagonals.

More significant, we never spent any real time on linear algebra back in High School. As a result, I lost on on a wealth of cute little tricks like this one.

Folks might find the following web site amusing:

http://softsurfer.com/Archive/algorithm_01...orithm_0101.htm
Alderaan delenda est
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#2 User is offline   gwnn 

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Posted 2009-June-19, 06:19

Nice, I didn't know about that theorem either. Indeed it's a cute page, thanks.
... and I can prove it with my usual, flawless logic.
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#3 User is offline   Jlall 

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Posted 2009-June-19, 19:14

obv
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#4 User is offline   blackshoe 

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Posted 2009-June-19, 21:12

What, no "LOL"? :P
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