Expanding Knowledge - Futility Closet

Expanding Knowledge - Futility Closet

Image: Wikimedia Commons Each side of the yellow square is 2 feet long. In the Meno, Socrates asks a slave boy how long would be the side of a square that had twice the yellow square’s area. The boy guesses first 4 feet, then 3, and finds himself at a loss. Socrates builds a square four times the size of the yellow one, then divides each of its constituent squares in half with a diagonal. The area of the blue square is thus twice that of the yel…