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 #6
avatar+2489 
+4

Hi Melody,

 

So in the USA a kite would qualify as a Trapezium.

 

. I probably wasn’t paying attention in class, but I don’t remember my geometry teacher referring to a kite to as a trapezium; though I suppose it may be a special case, where the pairs of equidistant lines are always adjacent.  This is similar in scheme to how a square is also a rhombus, rectangle, and parallelogram. LOL.  I have sometimes heard of a kite referred to as a diamond shape.

 

Oblong is a word I’ve heard since childhood. I think of it as an elongated oval or an ellipsoid blended with a rectangle; or a rectangle with the longer sides parallel, or nearly so, with continuously rounded corners for the width.  In some old texts, I’ve seen the word oblong used to mean rectangle.

 

Oval comes from the Latin Ovum –for egg, so it is egg-shaped. Specifically the shape refers to the eggs of the Gallus domesticus (domestic chicken), which has been familiar to most people for centuries. 

 

Most of my early education on shapes was from art classes. My high school Latin teacher also spent many classroom hours teaching the nuances of shapes in second and third-year Latin.  There are many Latin words describing shapes, and most were introduced in very early Latin dialects; the influence of the Greek is notable in many of these words. 

 

 Later, I learned that shapes that are graphical curves have both precise and general mathematical functions that produce them, such as parabolas, catenaries, ellipsis, and hyperbolas.  Because of the mathematical functions, there is little ambiguity about the shape; for example, how a catenary may be confused for a parabola.

 

...So much to learn and so little time to learn it....

 

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It is very nice to see you.

 

Thank you.

 

When I open web2.0calc’s forum pages and see posts by Melody, Alan, and ...ah ...ah ..., whoever the third answerer is now, I know that at least one part of the (virtual) world is functioning within normal parameters, even if the forum’s OS  sometimes does not.   

 

GASlán agat

 

--. .-

Oct 20, 2020
Oct 19, 2020
 #5
avatar+11912 
0
Oct 19, 2020

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