Partitioning Regular Polygons into Circular Pieces I: Convex Partitions

We explore an instance of the question of partitioning a polygon into pieces, each of which is as ``circular'' as possible, in the sense of having an aspect ratio close to 1. The aspect ratio of a polygon is the ratio of the diameters of the smallest circumscribing circle to the largest inscribed disk. The problem is rich even for partitioning regular polygons into convex pieces, the focus of this paper. We show that the optimal (most circular) partition for an equilateral triangle has an infinite number of pieces, with the lower bound approachable to any accuracy desired by a particular finite partition. For pentagons and all regular k-gons, k > 5, the unpartitioned polygon is already optimal. The square presents an interesting intermediate case. Here the one-piece partition is not optimal, but nor is the trivial lower bound approachable. We narrow the optimal ratio to an aspect-ratio gap of 0.01082 with several somewhat intricate partitions.Comment: 21 pages, 25 figure

A variational principle for cyclic polygons with prescribed edge lengths

We provide a new proof of the elementary geometric theorem on the existence and uniqueness of cyclic polygons with prescribed side lengths. The proof is based on a variational principle involving the central angles of the polygon as variables. The uniqueness follows from the concavity of the target function. The existence proof relies on a fundamental inequality of information theory. We also provide proofs for the corresponding theorems of spherical and hyperbolic geometry (and, as a byproduct, in $1+1$ spacetime). The spherical theorem is reduced to the euclidean one. The proof of the hyperbolic theorem treats three cases separately: Only the case of polygons inscribed in compact circles can be reduced to the euclidean theorem. For the other two cases, polygons inscribed in horocycles and hypercycles, we provide separate arguments. The hypercycle case also proves the theorem for "cyclic" polygons in $1+1$ spacetime.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures. v2: typos corrected, final versio