
Andrew Hacker and the Case of the Missing Trigonometry Question - aburan28
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/andrew-hacker-and-the-case-of-the-missing-trigonometry-question/
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gus_massa
Interesting case. IIRC in some test, the students are supposed to remember the
angles of the 3-4-5 triangle. I think it was a test form Peru, but I'm not
sure.

Perhaps the students have to study that for the test, but it was not an actual
question of the test.

As a mathematician, I consider thirty-something, ninety, fifty-something a
good enough answer, but the exact numbers are not very useful. (If you pay me
1 thousand dollars I can try to use the Taylor expansion of arctn to get the
exact number with a few decimal places, and for 1 million dollars I can try to
remember them.)

