## 2^n-gons

There’s nothing at all new about this, in fact it’s ancient, but maybe it’s new to you? So here goes.

Here’s a square inscribed in a unit circle:

Or to keep down the clutter, here’s just one quadrant of that:

One side of the square along with the radii at each endpoint forms a triangle. The length of one side of the square we’ll call $s_4$ and it is of course $\sqrt 2$. That means the perimeter of the square is $p_4 = 4\sqrt 2\approx 5.656854249$.

Now consider an inscribed octagon. Again, here’s just one quadrant.

One side of the square is labeled $s_8$; what’s its length? Well, drop a perpendicular from the vertex in the middle:

And now notice the right triangle with hypotenuse 1 and sides $x_8$ and $h_8$ is just half of a quadrant of an inscribed square, which means $h_8=s_4/2$. Then $x_8^2 = 1-h_8^2 = 1-s_4^2/4$. From that you can get $y_8=1-x_8$ and from that, $s_8^2=h_8^2+y_8^2$. The perimeter of the octagon is then $p_8 = 8s_8\approx 6.122934918$.

Well, that was so much fun, let’s do it again. Here’s a quadrant of a 16-gon:

The right triangle with hypotenuse 1 and sides $x_{16}$ and $h_{16}$ is just half of an eighth of an inscribed octagon, which means $h_{16}=s_8/2$. Then $x_{16}^2 = 1-h_{16}^2 = 1-s_8^2/4$, $y_{16}=1-x_{16}$, and $s_{16}^2=h_{16}^2+y_{16}^2$. The perimeter of the 16-gon is then $p_{16} = 16s_{16}\approx 6.242890305$.

You know the rest, right? From here you can do the 32-gon, 64-gon, 128-gon, and so on, getting $x_{2n}^2 = 1-h_{2n}^2 = 1-s_n^2/4$, $y_{2n}=1-x_{2n}$, $s_{2n}^2=h_{2n}^2+y_{2n}^2$, and perimeter $= p_{2n} = 2ns_{2n}$. For $n = 1024$, the perimeter is $p_{1024}\approx 6.283175451 = 2\times 3.1415877255$. As $n$ increases, the perimeter gets closer and closer to the circumference of the circle, so this gives a way to calculate $\pi$.

What about circumscribed polygons? If you look at the figures above, you can see the ratio of the size of a circumscribed square to an inscribed square is $1/x_8$. Likewise the ratio of the size of a circumscribed octagon to an inscribed octagon is $1/x_{16}$, and so on. So the perimeter of a circumscribed $n$-gon is $P_n = p_n/x_{2n}$. As $n$ increases, $P_n$ approaches $2\pi$ from above. And the average of $p_n$ and $P_n$ is a better approximation to $2\pi$ than either, though not by a lot.

 n h_n x_n y_n s_n p_n P_n average 4 1.41421356 5.65685425 8.00000000 6.82842712 8 0.70710678 0.70710678 0.29289322 0.76536686 6.12293492 6.62741700 6.37517596 16 0.38268343 0.92387953 0.07612047 0.39018064 6.24289030 6.36519576 6.30404303 32 0.19509032 0.98078528 0.01921472 0.19603428 6.27309698 6.30344981 6.28827340 64 0.09801714 0.99518473 0.00481527 0.09813535 6.28066231 6.28823677 6.28444954 128 0.04906767 0.99879546 0.00120454 0.04908246 6.28255450 6.28444726 6.28350088 256 0.02454123 0.99969882 0.00030118 0.02454308 6.28302760 6.28350074 6.28326417 512 0.01227154 0.99992470 0.00007530 0.01227177 6.28314588 6.28326416 6.28320502 1024 0.00613588 0.99998118 0.00001882 0.00613591 6.28317545 6.28320502 6.28319024

This is something like the way Archimedes calculated $\pi$ around 250 BC (I told you this was ancient), although he started with a hexagon rather than a square and only went up to a 96-gon. He didn’t have Google Sheets, though.

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## Three squares two triangles one circle

I’ve been trying lately to post my solutions to Catriona Shearer’s geometry puzzles in a tweet with no graphics; a severe constraint. For instance, this from yesterday:

This puzzle looked daunting at first but turned out to be easier than it looked. The tweet solution may be a bit too terse to be followed easily, though.

Here is a modified diagram:

I’ve labeled five points, and the sizes of the three squares: The largest square, touching the circle at point $A$, has size $a$; the medium square, touching at $C$, has size $b$, and the smallest square, touching at $D$, has size $c$. I added a copy of the smallest square, touching the circle at $E$, and drew in the chord $DE$.

The blue triangle is right, with legs $a$ and $c$, so its area is $(ac)/2$. The blue triangle is also right, with legs $a\sqrt{2}$ and $b\sqrt{2}$; its area is $(a\sqrt{2})(b\sqrt{2})/2 = ab$.

By the intersecting chords theorem, the product of lengths $AB$ and $BC$ is equal to the product of $BD$ and $BE$. But $AB = BE = a+c$, so $BC = BD = c$; that means $b = 2c$.

So the red triangle area is $2ac$ which is four times the area of the blue triangle. That area is 5, so the area of the red triangle is 20.

Sometimes, though, you just need to have a picture:

It’s obvious the red triangles’ height is $1/2$ but the blue triangles were less obvious to me. I noted that if you drop a perpendicular from the top vertex of the bottom blue triangle to the bottom line, the resulting right triangle has legs in a ratio of $1:2$ which sum to $1$, so the height is $1/3$. Another approach another poster mentioned is to note that a diagonal of the square is divided into three equal parts by the slanting lines and so the vertical projection of one of those parts has length $1/3$.

Either way, the red and blue triangles both have base = $1/2$ so a red triangle has area $1/8$, a blue triangle has area $1/12$, and four of each add up to $5/6$. Then the octagon’s area is the square’s ($1$) minus the triangles’ ($5/6$) which equals $1/6$.