Let’s talk about Pythagoras for a moment, shall we? Everyone learns his theorem in school – the square of the hypotenuse is the sum of the squares of the other two sides. So if you take the length of one side of a right-angled triangle, and square it; then take the length of the next side, and square it; add up those two numbers and it will equal, as if by magic, the length of the hypotenuse (the long side of the triangle), squared.
It’s a beautiful thing.
And as any pulp novel will tell you, people kill for beautiful things all the time.