## 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.