In the picture below we want to show that angle
is a right angle.
One way to see this is to take advantage of Cartesian
coordinates: Here we've identified our semicircle with the top half
of the graph of
.

To check that
is a right angle,
we will show that the Pythagorean theorem is satisfied for this
triangle (with the diameter of our circle as the hypoteneuse of the
right triangle). In terms of our coordinates:

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Neal Carothers - carother@bgnet.bgsu.edu