I would have asked this on a math community but I couldn’t find an active one.

In a spherical geometry, great circles are “straight lines”. As such, a triangle can have two or even three right angles to it.

But what if you go the long way around the back of the sphere? Is that still a triangle?

(Edit:) I guess it’s a triangle! Fair enough; I can’t think of what else you would call it. Thanks, everyone.

  • @tonyn@lemmy.ml
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    129 months ago

    The term you are looking for to describe such a shape is technically “spherical polygon”. Triangles are impossible in speherical geometry since the sum of the angles would always be greater than 180°.

    • Blóðbók
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      409 months ago

      There is no rule that the angles of a triangle add to 180 degrees. It only holds true in Euclidean geometry, which this is not.