Triangles in hyperbolic space

Frank Sottile


One of the sub-activities in the hyperbolic football activity is drawing triangles in the hyperbolic plane and measuring the sum of their angles. (Described there at Triangles and Curvature.) When I get data from a classroom, it is instructive to plot it. The plots below display the students' data as red circles, the maroon line is the line fitted to the data using the least-squares method, and the blue line is
"sum of angles" = 180-60/7*(number of internal vertices),
which represents the theoretical relationship. (60/7 is about 8.57.) Note that despite the noisy data from the students, the fitted line is quite close to the true line.

Sarah Witherspoon's Math 367 Class on February 1 2018.   Fitted line:
"sum of angles" = 184.52 - 9.105 *(number of internal vertices) .

Last modified: Sun Mar 4 08:05:38 CST 2018