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=∫10n√1−xndx
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:
∫10n√1−xndx=Γ(1+1n)2Γ(n+2n)
where ℜ(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:
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=nxn−1dx=nt1−1ndx
∫10n√1−xndx=1n∫10t1n−1(1−t)1ndt=1n∫10t1n−1(1−t)1+1n−1dt=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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