I Couldn't Help It—I Had To Square the Circle!
This summer I pretty much forgot about geometry, but with fall’s first chill, I got to thinking about a 20° angle I ran across last winter. It had an arc length of π and I wondered, “Would it really be so impossible to straighten out an arc and geometrically produce a line segment the length of pi?” If 2πr is the length of a circle’s circumference, a circle with a radius of 1 has a circumference of 2π, and its semicircle has a 180° arc equal to π. My 20° angle goes into 180° nine times, so by having a radius of nine, its arc also equals π, right? A 20° angle with a radius of 9 has an arc length of π. And the longer the radius, the more acute the angle, and the arc becomes a shorter section of its circle with less curvature. So in GeoGebra I explored how close to linear π the arc of an angle could get by going long on the radius and narrow on the angle. To do this properly for a passable geometric solution, I had to use conventionally constructible angles. Last Tuesday, Septe...