Monday, 18 July 2016

integration - Area of supercircles, or how to integrate int10sqrt[n]1xndx?



Martin Gardner, somewhere in the book Mathematical Carnival; talks about superellipses and their application in city designs and other areas. Superellipses(thanks for the link anorton) are defined by the points lying on the set of curves:



|xa|n+|yb|n=1




After reading the chapter, I was wondering how to calculate the area of these shapes. So I started by the more simplistic version of supercircles' area:



A4=10n1xndx



Although, it looks simple, but I wasn't able to evaluate the integral(except some simple cases, i.e. n=1,2,12,13,). So I asked Mathematica to see if its result can shed some light on the integration procedure, the result was:



10n1xndx=Γ(1+1n)2Γ(n+2n)


where (n)>0. But I still couldn't figure out the integration steps. So my question is: how should we do this integration?







SideNotes:



It's easy to evaluate the integral in the limit of n! One way to do it is using Taylor series expansion, and keeping the relevant terms(only first term in this case).



Some beautiful supercircles are shown in the image bellow:



supercircles
beautiful supercircles




As one can see their limiting case is a square.



Also, it will be really nice, if one can calculate the volume of the natural generalization of the curve to 3(or k) dimensions:



|xa|n+|yb|n+|zc|n=1


Answer



Let t=xn, hence dt=nxn1dx=nt11ndx
10n1xndx=1n10t1n1(1t)1ndt=1n10t1n1(1t)1+1n1dt=1nβ(1n,1+1n)=1nΓ(1n)Γ(1+1n)Γ(n+2n)=Γ(1+1n)2Γ(n+2n)



Wonderful problem presentation by the way! I enjoyed waking up to this.


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