Calculating Elizabeth Hurley’s shoe size with Pythagoras Theorem

Mad as it sounds this thread came up in conversation on twitter a few months ago. My friend, Tim, while waiting in an airport queue reported to all that Ms Hurley, in front, was wearing nine inch high heels.

A tall order (so to speak) but that was setting all manner of alarm bells off in my head. The poor lass would either topple over or have feet big enough to accommodate such footwear.  Anyone dafter could possibly investigate such matters.

So we might as well start here…. a few things to consider:

• We have a height – nine inches
• We can moderately assume with 85% confidence the measurement between the base of the heel and the mid point of the sole. For this exercise let’s say 5 inches.
• With two pieces of data we can easily establish the third.

Pythagoras Theorem let’s us find out nicely.  Ms Hurley’s heels can be shown as thus in the image below.

We have the values for a and b measurements so we can safely calculate the value of c.

So c = the square root of 5² add 9²

So c would 10.29 inches or 26.15 cm – I’m going to add 5% for the curve in the shoe giving us 27.45cm. According to the shoe size chart on Wikipedia 27.5cm is an adult size 8.5 shoe so we can assume our approximate measurement is about right or Ms Hurley is scrunching her toes up a bit.

The alternative, which isn’t half as much fun as giving a really awesome maths lesson, is to just look up Ms Hurley’s shoe size on Google, reportedly a US 9.5 or UK 8.5…..

Perhaps Timmy was right all along 🙂