Interactive · 2 questions
The sum of the three angles in a triangle is 180 degrees.
You can find the proof anywhere, but let's go through it here:
Draw line ECD going through C, parallel to AB.
Then angle ECA equals angle CAB and angle DCB equals angle CBA (because ECD and AB are parallel lines; explanation is here). Since ECD is a straight angle, it has measure 180.
Now, we can attempt to show that the sum of the interior angles of a n-gon is .
How can we do this?
We'll go with the "simple proof".
Consider a polygon like the pentagon below:
We have a pentagon, and we split it into 3 triangles. Each triangle has angle sum 180, so the total sum is .
We can split an n-gon into n-2 triangles like this, and therefore the sum of angles is .
Given this fact, what is the sum of all the exterior angles of an n-gon?
Explanation:
There are actually other ways to directly calculate the sum of exterior angles, but we can talk through how to do it with what we've just learned here. If an exterior angle is the angle between one side of a polygon and the extension of an adjacent side, then for each vertex of a polygon, its exterior and interior angles sum to 180 degrees (the straight angle). Therefore, for one vertex, the exterior angle equals 180 minus the interior angle. Since the sum of all interior angles equals , the sum of all exterior angles is therefore degrees.