Why do you disregard the negative square root in the pythagorean theorem? 25 POINTS!!!! PLEASE HELP!!!!!!!!!!!

Question

asked Jul 3, 2019 109k views

1 Answer

Jaime Roman · Answer 1 · 2019-07-10T09:45:55+0000

The pythagorean theorem is

$r^2 = a^2 + b^2 \implies r = \pm √(a^2+b^2)$

However, r is defined to be a distance, which has no meaning when it is negative.

[edit] Since negative distance has no meaning, the negative square root in above equation is never used.