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
Area of a circle good approximation to the circumference. To compute "u" and "U" for large "n", Archimedes derived the following doubling formulae: Starting from a hexagon, Archimedes doubled "n" four times to get a 96-gon, which gave him a good approximation to the circumference of the circle. In modern notation, we can reproduce his computation (and go further) as follows. For a unit circle, an inscribed hexagon has "u" = 6, and a circumscribed hexagon has "U" = 4. Doubling seven times yields The last entry of the table has ⁄ as one of its best rational approximations; i.e., there is no better