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
Area of a circle formula_53. The calculations Archimedes used to approximate the area numerically were laborious, and he stopped with a polygon of 96 sides. A faster method uses ideas of Willebrord Snell ("Cyclometricus", 1621), further developed by Christiaan Huygens ("De Circuli Magnitudine Inventa", 1654), described in . Given a circle, let "u" be the perimeter of an inscribed regular "n-"gon, and let "U" be the perimeter of a circumscribed regular "n-"gon. Then "u" and "U" are lower and upper bounds for the circumference of the circle that become sharper and sharper as "n" increases, and their average ("u" + "U")/2 is an especially