ChapterZero

I’ve been working on a geometry (triangle) problem for a day now; Zach posted it to the UH Math club mailing list. It’s one of those problems that looks ridiculously easy, like all you have to do is identify some similar triangles, but it’s turning out not to be so easy.

This morning I spent about 3 hours working with Eukleides and LaTeX to produce a nicely typset version of the problem, to which I can hopefully append a solution some time soon. It took me so long because: i) I’m not familiar with Eukleides, ii) while Eukleides has better than average documentation, it is not a tome of comprehensiveness, and iii) getting the illustration to fit unto a double-column page (with the problem on the other side) was tough. I ended up having to use \raisebox and \makebox to trick LaTeX into ‘thinking’ the illustration was skinnier than it actually is.

In the process, I conceived of a more powerful Eukleides, one based on/ interleaved with Scheme. The current one is ok, and very useful, but it could have more features. And as is, it doesn’t support looping.