How can a shape be strong?
In: Engineering
When you have steel girders or wooden beams that are welded, nailed, screwed or riveted together, the joins will usually be the weak spots. It’s way easier to change the angle of one of the joins than it is to stretch, shorten or bend one of the beams.
Triangles have the neat property that a triangle can be fully defined by the lengths of its three sides. So as long as you don’t put enough force to bend or stretch one of the beams, you also can’t change the angles of the triangle.
Other shapes don’t have that property. A quadrangle with four equal sides could be a square – but it could also be a rhombus. So no matter how strong the beams are, any square can easily be squished into a rhombus and then totally flattened.
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