In layman’s terms please, no geometry/engineering jargon.
In: Engineering
It’s not that they’re the strongest shape – there is a very specific thing that they’re good at. A triangle cannot change shape without changing the length of its sides – this is uniquely true. Imagine a square – if you pulled on the corner then the square would stretch into a parallelogram as the corners bend even if the sides don’t change length.
Triangles can’t be stretched like that. Because of this, if you pull on the corner of a triangle, you will not create any bending force in the sides. Only squishing and stretching.
Let’s pause that for a moment. If I handed you a stick and asked you to break it, how would you go about it? You would bend it, right? You can’t pull a stick apart or crush it with your bare hands but you can *bend* it pretty easily. It’s way easier to bend a material than to stretch or squish it.
So triangles allow us to turn a force *at their corner* into just squishing and stretching, which is easier for materials to deal with. If the force is *not* at the corner then all bets are off.
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