In layman’s terms please, no geometry/engineering jargon.
In: Engineering
We do have to go a little bit into geometry for this, but I promise, it’s not big. While you were studying geometry in school, you may have heard of the SSS postulate: if you have two triangles, and their sides have the same lengths, then they are the exact same shape.
This, right here, is pretty much it. If something has more than three sides, I can change the angles around to make more shapes: for example, I could turn a rectangle into a parallelogram, or flip some of the angles in a pentagon inside out, or any number of other things. And when you try to build things out of other shapes, you can see this as well: the angles can bend and distort the original shape, even if nothing is wrong with the beams that make up the sides of these shapes. But triangles are rigid: for any set of three side lengths, there is only one shape it can have. Angles and sides shouldn’t distort unless they snap completely.
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