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what do you do when you only know one angle of a triangle and one side length
 Mar 11, 2014
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There's nothing you can do. To solve any triangle, we need to know:

1. Three sides - we can use the law of cosines to find one of the angles, and the law of sines to find another.
2. ASA, AAS - The other angle is obvious We can use the law of sines to solve the other two sides.
3. SAS - We can use the law of cosines to find the remaining side and the law of sines to find the other unknown angle.
4. SSA - Be careful to account for the ambiguous case, here. We might have one, two or no triangles!!

Note.....just knowing the three angles doesn't help, either!!! There are no "laws" available to find any of the sides. (To see this, note that similar triangles have the same angles, but their sides are different. Thus, I could construct an infinite number of similar triangles - all of which would have different sides.)
 Mar 12, 2014

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