The Pythagorean theorem allows us to calculate easily how far a satellite is visible at such a great height.
A competent draftsman could attach some form of post-solution activity to almost any mathematical formula; the Pythagorean theorem would not have been patentable, or partially patentable, because a patent application contained a final step indicating that the formula, when solved, could be usefully applied to existing surveying techniques.
Liouville's theorem | Pythagorean | Chinese remainder theorem | Shannon–Hartley theorem | Quillen–Suslin theorem | Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem | Hahn–Banach theorem | Fermat's Last Theorem | Buckingham π theorem | Thue–Siegel–Roth theorem | Szemerédi's theorem | Schottky's theorem | Riemann-Roch theorem | Pythagorean tuning | Pythagorean theorem | Nash embedding theorem | Müntz–Szász theorem | Malgrange–Ehrenpreis theorem | Kleene fixed-point theorem | Kakutani fixed-point theorem | Gauss–Bonnet theorem | Doob's martingale convergence theorem | Dirichlet's theorem on arithmetic progressions | Denjoy theorem | Birch's theorem | Wilkie's theorem | Wick's theorem | Whitney extension theorem | Weierstrass theorem | Wedderburn's little theorem |