Comment by bryanrasmussen
Comment by bryanrasmussen 4 days ago
unfortunately doesn't work for me because of difficulty visualizing things, so I suppose there are probably a good number of people with the same problem.
So I guess for one particular subset of the population it is difficult, impossible to understand, and because it cannot be understood it will not be remembered.
Not complaining just noting the amusing thing that different explanations may have all sorts of problems with it.
Although if there was a video of it I guess I would understand it then. Not sure if everyone with visualization issues would though.
To be fair, I'm constrained by plain text on Hacker News. The argument I wrote down requires a diagram to be fully understood, so I described it in words expecting the reader to draw it themselves, or at least mentally visualize it (for those used to doing it).
To be clear though, as far as I know every proof of the Pythagorean Theorem requires some sort of diagram, and the one I gave requires literally the least amount of drawing out of all the proofs (which is a bold claim, but call it a conjecture). That's why I felt comfortable writing out the proof just in words.