- #1
vsage
You know this should be simple but it's just not. A friend asked me this earlier and I was unable to disprove him. We're all aware of how one derives the area of a polar equation.. it's [tex] \pi r^2 \frac {\theta}{2 \pi}[/tex] and make theta infinitely small and integrate. Why can't a similar process be performed to find the arclength? IE [tex] 2 \pi r \frac{\theta}{2 \pi}[/tex] and make theta infinitely small and integrate. Obviously I can't derive this from rectangular coordinates because it only works for constant r but I just can't seem to disprove it.
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