Area of a circle order to arrive at the formula for the area of a disk. Consider unwrapping the concentric circles to straight strips. This will form a right angled triangle with r as its height and 2r (being the outer slice of onion) as its base. Finding the area of this triangle will give the area of the disk The opposite and adjacent angles for this triangle are respectively in degrees 9.0430611..., 80.956939... and in radians 0.1578311... , 1.4129651... Explicitly, we imagine dividing up a circle into triangles, each with a height equal to the circle's radius and a base that is infinitesimally
Earth's circumference shadow on the ground. Using the length of the rod, and the length of the shadow, as the legs of a triangle, he calculated the angle of the sun's rays. This angle was about 7°, or 1/50th the circumference of a circle; taking the Earth as perfectly spherical, he concluded that the Earth's circumference was 50 times the known distance from Alexandra to Syene (5,000 stadia, a figure that was checked yearly), i.e. 250,000 stadia. Depending on whether he used the "Olympic stade" (176.4m) or the Italian stade (184.8m), this would imply a circumference of 44,100 km (an error of