Video:What Is Geometry?

Transcript:What Is Geometry?

Hi, I am Nazly Jordan for About.com and today we are going to talk about Geometry.

Everyday Uses of Geometry:

Geometry is an ancient Greek word. Literally translated - it means earth measurement. It was developed in Egypt more than 4000 years ago. Due to floods Egyptians had to come up with a way to re-measure the fields of the farmers. And up to today we use Geometry to measure and model any kind of objects in our daily life.

Houses for example are a compound of many geometric figures. The windows are rectangles, the roofs come in the shape of a triangle and the building itself is usually a cube. Architects use geometry to create new houses and buildings. And home owners use geometry when they feel like painting their house.

Important Geometry Formulas:

By using a simple geometric formula you can find out how much paint you need to buy. Let's assume we want to paint this side of the house. Then we have to measure the height and the width of this side of the house. And by multiplying the height by the width we will find out that we have to buy enough paint to cover an area of a times b square feet.

Common Geometric Figures:

This can is another example for a geometric figure. It is called a cylinder. And if we only look at the top of it then we see another geometric figure, a circle. As you already know we can use geometry to solve real life problems. You see this can does not have a label. But we need one so we know what's inside of the can without having to open it. In order to create a label for this can we need to know what size our paper has to be to fit all around the cylinder.

By using this formula (2 pi r) X h we can solve this problem. As you could see geometry provides many formulas and those come always handy when we need to calculate special characteristics of an object.

Thanks for watching. If you would like to learn more about math, check out About.com .