A disk of radius rolls all the way around the inside of a square of side length and sweeps out a region of area . A second disk of radius rolls all the way around the outside of the same square and sweeps out a region of area . The value of can be written as , where , , and are positive integers and and are relatively prime. What is ?
Pick one
Solution
Answer (A): To obtain the region swept out by the first disk, remove a square of side length from the center of the original square and replace the unit squares at the corners of the original square with quarter-circles of radius . The area of this region is
The region swept out by the second disk is the disjoint union of rectangles, each with length and width , and quarter-circles of radius , so its area is . Therefore
Solving this equation gives , so the requested sum is .
Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track
puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.