Area of a circle of Cnidus in the fifth century B.C. had found that the area of a disk is proportional to its radius squared. Archimedes used the tools of Euclidean geometry to show that the area inside a circle is equal to that of a right triangle whose base has the length of the circle's circumference and whose height equals the circle's radius in his book "Measurement of a Circle". The circumference is 2"r", and the area of a triangle is half the base times the height, yielding the area "r" for the disk. Prior to Archimedes, Hippocrates of Chios was the first
Distance from a point to a line formula_19, and formula_20in terms of the coordinates of P and the coefficients of the equation of the line to get the indicated formula. Let "P" be the point with coordinates ("x", "y") and let the given line have equation "ax" + "by" + "c" = 0. Also, let "Q" = ("x", "y") be any point on this line and n the vector ("a", "b") starting at point "Q". The vector n is perpendicular to the line, and the distance "d" from point "P" to the line is equal to the length of the orthogonal projection of formula_21 on n. The