The length of each leg of an isosceles right triangle is 13 cm. What is the length of the hypotenuse?

Question

The length of each leg of an isosceles right triangle is 13 cm. What is the length of the hypotenuse?

Answer 1

For right triangles, we can use the Pythagorean theorem. This means that a²+b² = c². In this problem, a and b are the given side lengths of the triangle. This means that a=b=13. To solve this problem, we plug in 13 to the equation above and solve for c.

13² + 13² = c²

169+169 = c²

338 = c²

square root(338) = c

c = 18.38

The above math proves that the hypotenuse of this triangle will be 18.38 cm long.