An Elementary Proof of a Remarkable Relation Between the Squircle and Lemniscate
Abstract
It is well known that there is a somewhat mysterious relation between the area of the quartic Fermat curve x4+y4=1, aka squircle, and the arc length of the lemniscate (x2+y2)2=x2-y2. The standardproof of this fact uses relations between elliptic integrals and the gamma function. In this article we generalize this result to relate areas of sectors of the squircle to arc lengths of segments of the lemniscate. We provide a geometric interpretation of this relation and an elementary proof of the relation, which only uses basic integral calculus. We also discuss an alternate version of this kind of relation, which is implicit in a calculation of Siegel.
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