Tuesday, 29 October 2013

euclidean geometry - How big is my pizza, if I know its slices' sizes?




I bought a box of frozen pizza: eight slices, baked and then frozen, stacked in a box. The packaging assured me that I was holding an 18-inch[-diameter] pizza. That got me thinking: how do I know they're not lying?



Assume (though this may not be true of the pizza) that we have a circle[1] S=D centered at a point O and four chords (closed line segments properly embedded in D) that intersect in a single point C. (Possibly C=O.) You may assume also (because this seems reasonable for pizza) that the angles made between adjacent chords (in the cyclic order around C) is between 30 and 60 and that the distance between C and O is less than the distance between C and S.



Is it possible to use the lengths of the segments from C to S and the angles between adjacent segments to find the diameter of D? (If not, then would it be possible if my "you may assume also" assumptions were tightened a little?) If so, how?



(Of course, it's possible to find the diameter by measuring the arclengths of the curved parts of the slices of pizza, adding them up, and dividing by π. But I'm wondering if there's a way to do it from the sidelengths and tip-of-the-slice angles of the pizza slices.)







[1] A geometric circle, meaning the locus of points a certain distance from O, not just a topological circle.


Answer



Let a pizza triangle be the convex envelope of the vertices of a pizza slice. The area of any pizza triangle is a bit smaller then the area of its pizza slice, but not so much (especially given the condition on the angles). It is easy to compute the area of a pizza triangle through the sine theorem, so a simple criterion is given by computing the sum of the areas of the pizza triangles and compare it with the area of a regular octagon inscribed in a circle with diameter 18 inches.



Anyway, given two opposite pizza slices it is not difficult to compute the radius of the disk from which they have been cut, since two opposite pizza slices give a cyclic quadrilateral for which it is not difficult to compute the side lengths and the area given a,b,c,d,θ:



enter image description here



hence the circumradius is provided by Parameshvara's formula:




R=14Δ(l1l3+l2l4)(l1l2+l3l4)(l1l4+l2l3)
where l1,l2,l3,l4 are the side lengths of the cyclic quadrilateral depicted above: they can be computed through the cosine theorem. Also notice that Ptolemy's theorem gives: l1l3+l2l4=(a+c)(b+d).



Another possible approach is the following. We have:
powΓ(C)=ac=bd=R2OC2,
so we just need to find OC2. If we take M and N as the midpoints of the chords in the picture above, it is trivial that OC is the diameter of the circumcircle of CMN, and we may compute the circumradius of CMN through the sine theorem:
OC2=MN2sinθ
then the length of MN through the cosine theorem, so that:
OC2=1sin2θ((ac2)2+(bd2)2|ac||bd|2cosθ)
and:





R2=ac+14sin2θ[(ac)2+(bd)22|ac||bd|cosθ].




If you do not know which couples of slices are "antipodal", well, they are not difficult to recognize: antipodal slices must have the same angle θ and fulfill ac=bd (the intersecting chord theorem).


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