Hi all, Just to relieve the recent boredom of this list, how about this one:
As some of you may know, I have an analemmatic sundial in my garden (story on my homepage). The person who did the actual work had to know how much material (tiles, bricks etc.) he would need. Then I found out that there is no 'simple' formula for the circumference of an ellipse. (I also found out that this led to a lot of interesting mathematics, called 'elliptic integrals'. I knew the term, but never realized where it came from.) The formula for the area of a circle generalizes simply to the area of an ellipse (pi x r x r -> pi x a x b ; a and b being half the major and minor axes, resp.). What puzzles me since is, why the circumference of a circle does NOT generalize simply (actually, not at all) to an ellipse. My question thus is: does anyone of you happen to know of a NON- mathematical, intuitively convincing explanation for the fact that there is no 'simple' formula for the circumference of an ellipse? Regards, Frans Maes ===================================== Frans W. Maes Peize, The Netherlands 53.1 N, 6.5 E www.biol.rug.nl/maes/ =====================================
