Area Blue Ridge Community College（区域蓝岭社区学院）.pdfVIP

Area Cavalieri’s principle If all the lines parallel to some fixed line that meet the plane regions M1 and M2 do so in line segments having equal lengths, whose endpoints lie in the boundaries of the two regions, then Area M = Area M . 1 2 The essential requirement is that it holds for any arbitrary line segment - if we can pick an x at random, draw a line at that height, an discover that the segments in the figures are the same length, then the figures have the same area. The idea is basically that of a stack of blocks - if you shift the blocks over, you haven’t changed the total area. And each figure does not necessary have to be the same width throughout (e.g. rectangles); they simply need to be the same width as each other at any arbitrary height. Example: Cavalieri’s principle can be used to establish the formula for the area of a parallelogram. • Consider a parallelogram with base b and height h, with b pependicular to h, and a rectangle also with base b and height h. • Since at any arbitrary height x, the widths of the parallel segments in the parallelogram have the same length as the corresponding segments in the rectangle, the area of the parallelogram must equal that of the rectangle. A = bh Example: Cavalieri’s principle can also be used to establish the formula for the area of a triangle. • Start with a triangle with base b and height h, with b pependicular to h. • Construct a parallelogram (as shown in lecture). • Since the triangles are congruent, they have the same area (Congruence Postulate). • Since the triangles are non-intersecting regions whose union is the parallelogram, the total area is that of the parallelogram (Postulate of Additivity).