Area of a circle Archimedes is not rigorous by modern standards, because it assumes that we can compare the length of arc of a circle to the length of a secant and a tangent line, and similar statements about the area, as geometrically evident. The area of a regular polygon is half its perimeter times the apothem. As the number of sides of the regular polygon increases, the polygon tends to a circle, and the apothem tends to the radius. This suggests that the area of a disk is half the circumference of its bounding circle times the radius. Following Archimedes' argument in "The
Distance from a point to a line formula_39 perpendicular to the line. The distance from the point to the line is then just the norm of that vector. This more general formula is not restricted to two dimensions. If the vector space is orthonormal and if the line ("l" ) goes through point A and has a direction vector formula_45, the distance between point P and line ("l") is where formula_47 is the cross product of the vectors formula_48 and formula_45 and where formula_50 is the vector norm of formula_45. Note that cross products only exist in dimensions 3 and 7. Distance from a point to a