the.com/diagonal
the shortcut your eyes take when corners feel too obedient.
means Running at a slant between two corners or sides, rather than straight up-down or side-to-side.
from From Greek 'diagonios,' built from 'dia-' (across, through) and 'gonia' (angle, corner) — the same 'gonia' hiding in 'polygon' and 'pentagon.' So a diagonal is literally a line drawn 'across the corners,' a path the Greeks named for the angles it dared to cut through. It reached English in the 16th century by way of Latin 'diagonalis.'
- name origin
- Greek diagonios means corner-to-corner angle
- square count
- an n-gon hides n(n-3)/2 diagonals
- shortest crossing
- always beats walking two sides of a rectangle
- in fashion
- diagonal stripes trick eyes into seeing slimness
- chess kings
- bishops live and die on diagonals alone
for instance
diagonal of the pentagon — connects non-adjacent vertices; a regular pentagon has 5 diagonals forming a pentagram when all drawn