Math calculations can determine the outcome of a court case. Sometimes attorneys work on a case that involves details about distances. If an attorney calculates the distance by adding up the lengths along streets, it's a different answer than an attorney that finds the length of the single line between two places.


A case has gone to trial during which attorneys used math to prove that the distance that a registered sex offender lives from a neighborhood park was legal or was illegal. (We have streets built in right angles to each other usually, and the actual distance between the two places is a straight line. The streets make the legs of a right triangle, and the distance which people want to calculate is the hypotenuse—the tilted line. We work out a math problem to find the hypotenuse because we can't drive through the buildings that the hypotenuse goes through!) The results of the case: the registered sex offender's probation was revoked, and he was sent to prison.


Any person can use the Pythagorean Theorem. If you know A squared plus B squared = C squared and how to work with it, you can use it in real life. You never know when a situation for it will come up, but it is an important rule in real-world geometry.