Name ______________________ Date ____________

Calculus
Limits and Infinity, oh my! (Part 1)
First, close your eyes and take yourself back in time … before the age of Google, and before the age
when math students simply memorized formulas. In fact, take yourself way back to Ancient Greece.
Are you there yet? Once you are, you’re going to take on the following challenge:

How could you figure out the area of a circle with radius 1?

Think about it … finding the area of a curved shape isn’t so easy! Rulers aren’t especially helpful. The
Greeks spent a long time working on this method is inspired by their work.

Step 1
Suppose the radius of the circle is 1. Also suppose that all inscribed polygons are “regular” (meaning
that every side has the same length).

Let An be the area of the inscribed polygon with n sides. Fill in the chart that follows and show all
your calculations on a separate sheet of paper.

(Hint: cut each shape into lots of triangles and use your old friend SOH-CAH-TOA.)

A
A33
A4  

A5  
A6  
 Area (rounded to 5 decimal places)

A3

A4

A5

A6

A10

A100

A1000

A10000

A100000

Yes, this would be the area of a polygon with 100,000 sides. Good
thing you don’t have to be able to draw it in order to calculate it!

Challenge: Can you find a general formula for An ?

Step 2
So, instead of finding the area of the circle directly, the Greeks found the area of different shapes
(“regular polygons”) that fit inside the circle. The trick was, these different shapes got bigger and
bigger so that their areas would eventually “approach” the area of the circle.

What number do the areas seem to be approaching? _______ Are you surprised? _____________

In math-speak,

This is read as “The limit of An as n approaches infinity is _______.”

Step 3: Summarize, in a way your little cousin would understand, how you could derive (figure
out) the area of a circle without using a formula.