Triangle Metres

14 May, 2025

Reading Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, I realized that Feynman and I shared the same playful idea.

Feynman, as a kid, hated Trigonometry symbols. So, he invented his own—like a sigma with an overstretching arm for sine. He also created symbols for cosine, tan, and more.

Similar to Feynman, I hated expressing area in square metres as a kid. So, I came up with triangle metres instead.

Here's how my units—triangle metres work:

Take a 5x2 rectangle. Its area is 10 square metres. This means 10 squares of 1 metre each fit in the rectangle.

Each square, when cut diagonally, gives a pair of triangles. So, for 10 squares, you get 20 triangles.

Now, the area of 5x2 rectangle can be expressed as 20 triangle metres.

Though my units worked, I hit the same wall Feynman did.

Feynman once solved a problem for another student using his symbols. The other kid couldn’t follow any of it.

That’s when Feynman saw that his symbols only made sense to him. He learned that sharing ideas needs common symbols.

I ran into something similar. No other kid used triangle metres. And though my teacher liked my creativity, she insisted that I stick to standard units.

Reading Feynman’s story brought all this back. And finding this shared childhood quirk with a famous physicist felt oddly satisfying.