SICP Exercise 1-3

Define a procedure that takes three numbers as arguments and returns the sum of squares of the two larger numbers

I broke this problem into 3 steps

Define a square function which will take one argument and return its square.

(define (square x) (* x x))
; (square 6) 36

Define a sum-of-squares function which will take two arguments and calculate sum of their squares.

(define (sum-of-squares x y) (+ (square x) (square y)))
; (sum-of-squares 3 4) 25

Define a max function which will take two numbers and return maximum of both numbers.

(define (max x y) (if (> x y) x y))
; (max 3 4) 4

Now the solution to the problem is just combine all the 3 subproblems into one.

EDIT: In my earlier logic, i had a flaw. I was just passing (max x y) (max y z) to the sum-of-squares function. Thanks to Ankur for pointing out the mistake. The second argument actually depends on the result of (max x y).

(define (sum-of-squares-of-2-larger x y z)
    (sum-of-squares (max x y)
                    (if (= (max x y) x)
                        (max y z)
                        (max x z)
                        )))
; (sum-of-squares-of-2-larger 1 2 3) 13
; (sum-of-squares-of-2-larger 5 4 3) 41
; (sum-of-squares-of-2-larger 1 3 2) 13

SICP chapter 1 tells about how problems can be solved by breaking them into smaller subproblems and then building from them and solving bigger problems.