hatchet planimeter

Question

enter image description here How does this instrument work? Here is a video that demonstrates its use.

After reading the wikipedia page, I still have no idea how it works. Any explanations that are easier to comprehend?

This link may be useful. It also links to a Java planimeter with an example usage. — Jack Henahan, Jun 16 '11 at 00:32

score 7 · Accepted Answer · edited Jun 16 '11 at 00:48

7

edited Jun 16 '11 at 00:48

t.b.

answered Jun 16 '11 at 00:36

Bill Dubuque

3

I must be missing something, I still do not get it. – picakhu Jun 16 '11 at 02:50
2

I'm sure you know this, but unless it is outside of the scope of the site, we usually prefer full answers to be posted here, rather than links to answers; the point being that if those sites went down, the answers here would still be valid and helpful to future googlers. – BlueRaja - Danny Pflughoeft Jun 16 '11 at 07:38
1

@Blue Plenty of answers here consist of links - esp for answers whose length would be inordinate without links. It does not make sense to attempt to completely duplicate the entire mathematical corpus here. And who is "we"? – Bill Dubuque Jun 16 '11 at 12:51
@Blue: I completely agree with Bill here. All the articles linked to should be trivial to find with the given information, even if the links should happen to break. I really think that it is exaggerated to ask for a summary of non-trivial articles written by renowned and outstanding mathematicians who evidently put a lot of effort into making their work understandable to as wide an audience as reasonably possible. By the way: ArXiV-links are guaranteed to be persistent. – t.b. Jun 16 '11 at 13:54
@pic What precisely don't you get? Did you read the nice exposition in section 2 of Foote's paper. If something about this is not clear then I'm sure folks here would be glad to assist you if you ask specific questions about such in your question. – Bill Dubuque Jun 16 '11 at 15:35

1 Answers1