Triangles in Navigation

GPS pinpoints your location using trilateration — measuring your distance from several satellites. Each distance places you on a sphere around that satellite, and where three (or more) spheres intersect is your exact position. That is different from classical triangulation, the surveyor's method, which fixes a point by measuring angles from known landmarks. Distances or angles, the geometry of the triangle does the work either way.

In computer graphics, every 3D surface is built from millions of tiny triangles — called a mesh. A triangle is the simplest flat shape in 3D space (three points always define a plane), so GPUs render everything as triangles. The virtual worlds in games and movies are triangles all the way down.