In layman’s terms please, no geometry/engineering jargon.
In: Engineering
This will probably require some drawing. Or match sticks or something to help visualize, but it’s actually a pretty simple geometrical reason: triangles are the shape with the highest load diffusion on their sides. Other answers kind of hit on this but not really so I’m going to try to help out a little more on the visualization of this. Take a triangle, draw it or something, then draw a line from one point to the middle of the opposite side. That is your force. Notice something here: that force is being applied to a point. This means the force will be distributed along the sides of that shape, and what’s at the other end of those sides? The other side. The only other side. So you can just….divide the force in half. Each side is sharing half the load. Try this again with a square. No matter how you orient this, you are applying force in a weird way. Take the example of the side. You push down on the side and now instead of having a pushing force being evenly distributed, you have a pulling force, trying to pull the bean apart. This is much weaker. Now on a point, you will see that the force is pushing the sides out, and then has to push the lower sides in. You can actually help this out pretty easily, of you just connect the middle two corners together to keep the shape from flattening! But notice what you just did? That’s right triangles. You can explore this with any shape you want really, and you’ll find that the strongest configuration for that shape is to divide it into triangles.
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