Pythagoras gets all the publicity but Heron was no slouch either... Heron was another ancient who is credited with devising a formula for computing the area of a triangle from knowing only the lengths of the 3 sides involved. The formula appears in a few different forms, 2 common ones below (a, b, and c represent the 3 sides of a triangle, and "s" is the perimeter value for same).
more on Heron's formula here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heron%27s_formula
An offshoot of Heron's formula is Brahmagupta's formula for the area of any 'cyclic'
quadrilateral (one that fits inside a circle):
- or
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1/4 √(a+b+c-d) (a+b-c+d) (a-b+c+d) (-a+b+c+d)
