"He's a witch! A math witch!"

While working on framing a house today I got to teach a math lesson. We had finished the walls and had to frame in a triangular part under the roof, twenty-five feet in the air. My crew had measured the vertical part and the horizontal part of the triangle and were trying to figure out how to get a tape measure up to the peak of the roof to determine the length of the top board. I told them we didn't need to, we can figure that out.

Blank looks.

"a" squared plus "b" squared equals "c" squared didn't ring a bell. So I made a few calculations so the guy with the saw would have something to do and then showed the rest of the crew how the Pythagorean theorem worked. At the end of the day my saw man came over and demanded to know how I figured the diagonal studs out.

In retrospect, it might have been easier to nail the vertical and horizontal legs of the triangle together and then cut the diagonal board to fit, as multiplication is much, much more difficult in 97 degree weather. But I may not get another chance to have basic geometry make me seem cool.