What do you call a line segment drawn from the vertex of the triangle to the midpoint of the opposite side?

A median of a triangle is a line segment drawn from a vertex to the midpoint of the opposite side of the vertex.

The medians of a triangle are concurrent at a point. The point of concurrency is called the centroid.

Example:

In the figure shown, L N = 14 units, N K = 22 units, and K L = 34 units. If K M ¯ is a median of the triangle, find the length of L M ¯ .

The fact that K M ¯ is a median tells us that M must be a midpoint of L N ¯ . So, to find L M , all we need to do is divide L N by 2 .

L M = 14 2 = 7  units

Note that this problem gives us a couple of pieces of irrelevant information. We don't need to know the values of N K and K L .

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