Film of visual proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem shown by Edward Tufte?

August 31, 2015 4:33 PM

In the late 1990s I attended one of Edward Tufte's day-long seminars. Tufte screened several short films for us, including "Mona Lisa Descending a Staircase", "Powers of Ten", and another short presenting a series of visual proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. There are a variety of such films out there on the tubes, but can anyone help identify which one Tufte is likely to have chosen?

In case it helps, the seminar I went to was held in the World Trade Center. It was probably 1998 or 1999.

posted by Songdog to Science & Nature (3 answers total)

Response by poster: (Apparently I comment about those films about once a decade.)
posted by Songdog at 5:43 PM on August 31, 2015 [1 favorite]

Not a film, but this sprang to mind in terms of elegant visual demonstration.
posted by robself at 5:15 AM on September 1, 2015

Sorry for the delay. I saw this days ago, and left it open in a browser tab until I could get to it.

I attended one of those Tufte seminars recently, and have all four of his books. Obviously none of them have any videos to show, but his first book ("Envisioning Information", 1990) does have a couple pages devoted to graphical representations of the Pythagorean theorem (pages 84-87 in my recent reprint).

He references "Oliver Byrne's 1847 edition of Euclid's Geometry" and "Charles Whittington", printer of the book. Image.

That's all I could find in checking the index pages in the back of each book.
posted by intermod at 7:38 PM on September 4, 2015