Innumeracy

I’m watching (in the background) The Wizard of Oz. I just noticed that when the wizard hands out the diploma to the scarecrow to give him a brain, the scarecrow says (apparently as evidence of his newfound knowledge) that “…the sum of the squares of the sides of an isosceles triangle is equal to the square of the other one.”

The problem being, of course, that it’s not true, at least not in Euclidean geometry. Pythagoras’ Theorem applies to right triangles, not isosceles triangles (triangles with two equal sides).

But then, perhaps the movie was making a subtle statement that having a diploma and spouting intelligent-sounding nonsense is all that constitutes smarts…