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
Great-circle distance Great-circle distance The great-circle distance or orthodromic distance is the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere, measured along the surface of the sphere (as opposed to a straight line through the sphere's interior). The distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of a straight line between them, but on the sphere there are no straight lines. In spaces with curvature, straight lines are replaced by geodesics. Geodesics on the sphere are circles on the sphere whose centers coincide with the center of the sphere, and are called "great circles". The determination of