Mathematics-Online lexicon: Law of Cosines

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	Mathematics-Online lexicon:
	Law of Cosines

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In a triangle, for the angle $\gamma$ opposite to side $\overline{AB}$ the following holds true:

$\displaystyle c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2 ab \cos\gamma\, .$

$\includegraphics[width=.4\linewidth]{a_cosinussatz}$

If $\gamma = \pi/2$ , then we obtain the special case of the Pythagorean Theorem: .

see also:

automatically generated 3/28/2008