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 a side, and "h" is the perpendicular height from the opposite vertex. This proof is only valid if the line is neither vertical nor horizontal, that is, we assume that neither "a" nor "b" in the equation of the line is zero. The line with equation "ax" + "by" + "c" = 0 has slope -"a"/"b", so any line perpendicular to it will have slope "b"/"a" (the negative reciprocal). Let ("m", "n") be the point of intersection of the line "ax" + "by" + "c" = 0 and the line perpendicular to it which passes through the point ("x", "y").