This picture was taken in 1971 by Carl E. Langenhop, my thesis advisor.
My birthdate is congruent to {7, 1, 5, 10, 11} mod {11, 13, 17, 19, 23}.
Square Triangles
In Nebraska we build triangular-shaped pastures as well as square ones,but the triangular ones must have the same area as some square pasture.
(Of course, fence posts throughout each ranch are equally spaced.)
The Nebraskan countryside is thus a crazy quilt of nearly every triangular shape and size.
None can be right-triangles or isosceles, but all shapes can be arbitrarily approximated.
For example, you can see these square-triangles with sides (a, b, c) as small as
(3, 25, 26) and (9, 10, 17) or as large as (423473, 562577, 805896).
NeSBoST (The Nebraska State Bureau of Square Triangles) has
parametric formulas for creating infinitely many non-similar shapes.
In pioneer days, to determine each such square-triangle, wooden computers were used which
contained three long rolls of paper tape on which were written long lists of strange numbers.
Professor Meisters still owns one of these early wooden & paper square-triangle computers.
In the real world there are billions of hard problems that can be solved with pure mathematics.
This has been the story of just one of them.