Area of a circle to eight sides and so on. For a polygon with 2"n" sides, the parallelogram will have a base of length "ns", and a height "h". As the number of sides increases, the length of the parallelogram base approaches half the circle circumference, and its height approaches the circle radius. In the limit, the parallelogram becomes a rectangle with width "r" and height "r". There are various equivalent definitions of the constant π. The conventional definition in pre-calculus geometry is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter: However, because the circumference of a circle is not a
Circumference in terms of these parameters. One such approximation, due to Euler (1773), for the canonical ellipse, is Some lower and upper bounds on the circumference of the canonical ellipse with formula_5 are Here the upper bound formula_9 is the circumference of a circumscribed concentric circle passing through the endpoints of the ellipse's major axis, and the lower bound formula_10 is the perimeter of an inscribed rhombus with vertices at the endpoints of the major and minor axes. The circumference of an ellipse can be expressed exactly in terms of the complete elliptic integral of the second kind. More precisely, we