Cutting a circle
Two ways to cut a circle into equal parts : sector cuts and parallel cuts.
Below you can find two calculators which calculate how to cut a circle into equal parts - traditional and non-traditional way. By traditional way I assume cutting a circle into sectors, just like you usually cut a pie or pizza. And by non-traditional way I assume cutting a circle into equal slices with parallel lines or with parallel chords, if you like. Both calculators present a drawing which illustrates the result. And you can find all formulas and math in the article below the calculators.
Cutting a Circle into Sectors
Ok, you need to cut a circle into number of sectors (even non-even number). To do this, you need to find parameters of a sector. It is a very simple task:
- Find the angle of a sector in radians by dividing 2π (which represents 360 degress in radians) by number of sectors.
- Find the length of an arc of a sectos by multiplying a radius by an angle of a sector in radians.
- Find the length of a chord of a sector by using Law of cosines (a chord is the base of the isosceles triangle, with two radiuses as legs and sector angle as apex angle).
This completely defines all N equal sectors.
Cutting a Circle with Parallel Cuts
This way is more interesting. For simplicity I will consider half of a circle, since it is symmetrical.

Let's cut it with vertical cuts. In this case we need to find the x-coordinates of parallel chords, which should split our circle to equal-area parts. (see points x1 and x2 on the picture above). Let's derive the general formula for an area of a left slice.
Our half-circle can be thought of as a function y=f(x), where x - is the coordinate along abscissa axis, and y is the function equal to value of corresponding half-circle point.

Using pythagorean theorem the y function is
To find an area of a left slice, you need to integrate this function from -R to x. The antiderivative of our function is :
We need to find value of constant. Obviously, at the point where x equals -R area should be zero. If we plug -R instead of x into the formula above we get
, hence
Our final integral is
Now how do we find x of the first cut? We know we area we should get - Nth part of the total area (note the half-circle)
Thus we can equate
Which gives us
This is transcendental equation, and we need to use numerical methods to solve it, for example, Bisection method or Newton's method. Here I used Newton's method.
Next points of cut can be found with the same approach. We need to cut two times more for second point , three times more for third point
and so on.
Then we can find all other parameters, like chord length, using the point coordinates.
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