Pythagoras Caught The Murderer!

  Yesterday, I was finishing up something while watching something called Forensic Files on TV.  It caught my attention because they were trying to find enough evidence to convict a couple of people of murder. 

There was a photo of the man throwing the murdered victim off the cliff but the woman involved claimed she'd never been anywhere the murder.

The forensic scientists went back over the evidence and in one photo, they found a shadow of the photographer.  The guy stated they used Pythagorean Theorem to figure out the height of the photographer.  

Digital photography time stamps pictures so the police knew the date and time of the photograph. This gave them enough information to determine the location of the sun.  Then using information about the camera, they could determine the distance between the person in the photo and the location of the camera and the distance of the shadow length on the ground.

So once they learned all the distances they needed, they were able to apply the Pythagorean theorem to determine the photographer  was 5 foot 6 inches tall.  This was the female suspect's height.  So they arrested her, tried her and both she and the male were both convicted of murder.

Most times when you see this type of problem in textbooks, they have you find the height of a tree, a building, or a flagpole.  Honestly, most of my students do not care how tall the flagpole is, all the trees in town are no more than 4 feet tall, and we have very few buildings that are even two story. 

They consider this type of problem as just another boring problem they have to do.  This episode of Forensic Files, add a real life application of something most people study in class.  I admit, when I had to do those types of problems in school, I wondered why I needed to know the height of a building because it should have been in the plans filed with the city.  Flag poles tend to be a set height and why do I need to know it.  Even for trees, I couldn't figure out why I needed to know the height.  After all if a tree gets too tall, the city comes through to chop it down.

This is a situation I plan to use in the classroom to spark interest.  I may have to create a forensics unit with math to make the topic a bit more interesting.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.