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On (not in) a sphere, choose three independent uniformly random points $A,B,C$. Is the following conjecture true:

The expectation of the ratio of the area of (planar) $\triangle ABC$ to the area of the (planar) disk with $A,B,C$ on its perimeter, is $1/4$.

My conjecture is based on experimentation: using sphere point picking, I ran $1.5\times10^7$ trials and the average ratio was about $0.2500075$.

Since $1/4$ is a simple ratio, I am wondering if there is an intuitive explanation (here is a recent example), but any proof is welcome.

Remarks:

Assume the sphere is a unit sphere. The expected area of the disk is $\frac{4\pi}{5}$ (proof). The expected area of the triangle seems to be $\frac{\pi}{5}$ based on experimentation, but I don't have a proof (Wolfram has a page called "Sphere triangle picking" but it's empty). Curiously, the expectation of the ratio seems to equal the ratio of the expectations.

The probability that the ratio is greater than $1/4$ is about $0.534$.

The standard deviation of the ratio is about $0.10667$ (could it be $8/75$?).

The probability density function of the ratio looks roughly like this:

enter image description here

The expectation of the reciprocal ratio (i.e. the ratio of the area of the disk to the area of the triangle) seems to be about $6.6$, but this ratio flucuates a lot and I'm not sure its expectation even exists.

My attempt:

I tried to adopt the techniques in the proof that the area of the disk is $\frac{4\pi}{5}$ (with a unit sphere), but I don't know how to express the area of the triangle in a usable way. I tried to find a more intuitive explanation, possibly using symmetry, but failed. (In the $2D$ case, the expected ratio of areas is $\frac{3}{2\pi^2}\approx 0.15198$ (proof), which is not an intuition-friendly number, so it seems that an intuitive explanation would apply to the $3D$ case but not the $2D$ case.)

Context:

This question was inspired by a question about a random triangle inscribed in a circle.

Dan
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    Perhaps worth clarifying that (if this is the case) both the triangle and the disc are planar - cutting through the sphere. – Blitzer Jan 08 '24 at 14:02
  • @Blitzer Thanks, I have editted. – Dan Jan 08 '24 at 14:04
  • I deleted my answer since I have finally realized that we need a stronger argument to solve this problem in the proper way. – Marco Ripà Jan 08 '24 at 14:40
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    I don't know if this helps. For any triangle with circumradius $R$ we have $4R=\frac{abc}{\triangle}$ and $\frac{a}{\sin A}=\frac{b}{\sin B}=\frac{c}{\sin C}=2R$ and so $\frac{\triangle}{\circ}=\frac2{\pi}\sin A \sin B \sin C$. And by a standard identity this is equal to $\frac1{2\pi}(\sin 2A+ \sin 2B +\sin 2C)$. And so the expected value of the ratio should be $\frac3{2\pi} E(\sin 2A)$. – Blitzer Jan 08 '24 at 14:41
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    what if one first picks a "sliced disk" and compute average area of a circumscribed triangle in this disk and then integrate that over the sphere, viewing it as a stack of these slices ? – dezdichado Jan 08 '24 at 15:36
  • This seems like it could be rewritten in terms of integrals – mick Jan 08 '24 at 22:41
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    @joriki, you are right. I misunderstood the post I linked to. I have deleted my erroneous comment. – Blitzer Jan 10 '24 at 07:00

1 Answers1

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What makes this interesting is how to obtain the joint distribution of the points on the circle. Writing three uniformly random points in spherical coordinates and trying to obtain the corresponding angles on the circle leads to a convoluted mess, so let’s try to go the other way and calculate the Jacobian for three points parameterized using the circle they form.

Let the circle be parallel to the $x$-$y$ plane at polar angle $\theta$, with three points at azimuthal angles $\varphi_i$, so their coordinates are $\vec r_i=(\sin\theta\cos\varphi_i,\sin\theta\sin\varphi_i,\cos\theta)$. To move this configuration into general position, we can rotate the $z$ axis into an arbitrary direction, e.g. by applying rotations about the $y$ axis and then the $x$ axis, through $\psi$ and $\xi$, say, for a total of six parameters, as required.

Consider the infinitesimal changes along the six orthogonal unit vectors in the directions $\frac{\partial\vec r_i}{\partial\theta}$ and $\frac{\partial\vec r_i}{\partial\varphi_i}$ when we change these parameters. That’s six changes for six parameters, so we get a $6\times6$ Jacobian. Label the columns by $\varphi_1,\varphi_2,\varphi_3,\theta,\psi,\xi$ and the rows by $\frac{\partial\vec r_1}{\partial\varphi_1},\frac{\partial\vec r_2}{\partial\varphi_2},\frac{\partial\vec r_3}{\partial\varphi_3},\frac{\partial\vec r_1}{\partial\theta},\frac{\partial\vec r_2}{\partial\theta},\frac{\partial\vec r_3}{\partial\theta}$.

Since we only need the dependence of the joint distribution on the $\varphi_i$, I’m going to drop all factors that don’t depend on them. Then the upper left $3\times3$ minor is the identity, and the one below it is zero, since changing $\varphi_i$ only causes a change along the corresponding vector $\frac{\partial\vec r_i}{\partial\varphi_i}$ and the magnitude of that change is the same for all points (namely $\sin\theta$) and doesn’t depend on the $\varphi_i$.

Thus, to get the determinant of the Jacobian, we can use Laplace expansion along the first three columns, which leaves us with the determinant of the lower right $3\times3$ minor.

The first column of that minor, which contains the changes with $\theta$ along $\frac{\partial r_i}{\partial\theta}$, has all entries $1$. To obtain the other two columns, consider the effect of the infinitesimal generators $\pmatrix{0&0&\epsilon\\0&0&0\\-\epsilon&0&0}$ and $\pmatrix{0&0&0\\0&0&\epsilon\\0&-\epsilon&0}$ of rotations about the $y$ and $x$ axis, respectively, on the $\vec r_i$:

$$ \pmatrix{0&0&\epsilon\\0&0&0\\-\epsilon&0&0}\pmatrix{\sin\theta\cos\varphi_i\\\sin\theta\sin\varphi_i\\\cos\theta}=\epsilon\pmatrix{\cos\theta\\0\\-\sin\theta\cos\varphi_i}\;, \\[18pt] \pmatrix{0&0&0\\0&0&\epsilon\\0&-\epsilon&0}\pmatrix{\sin\theta\cos\varphi_i\\\sin\theta\sin\varphi_i\\\cos\theta}=\epsilon\pmatrix{0\\\cos\theta\\-\sin\theta\sin\varphi_i}\;. $$

Taking the scalar product with the unit vector $\frac{\partial r_i}{\partial\theta}=(\cos\theta\cos\varphi_i,\cos\theta\sin\varphi_i,-\sin\theta)$ yields $\cos\varphi_i$ and $\sin\varphi_i$, respectively, so the lower right minor is

$$\begin{vmatrix}1&\cos\varphi_1&\sin\varphi_1\\1&\cos\varphi_2&\sin\varphi_2\\1&\cos\varphi_3&\sin\varphi_3\end{vmatrix}\;.$$

Interestingly, this happens to be proportional to the area of the triangle formed by the points, whose ratio to the area of the circle is, as Blitzer noted in a comment, given by

$$\frac2\pi\left|\sin\frac\alpha2\sin\frac\beta2\sin\frac\gamma2\right|=\frac1{2\pi}|\sin \alpha+\sin\beta+\sin\gamma|\;,$$

where $\alpha=\varphi_2-\varphi_1$, $\beta=\varphi_3-\varphi_2$ and $\gamma=\varphi_1-\varphi_3$.

Thus, the expected value of this ratio is

$$ \mathsf E\left[\frac\triangle\bigcirc\right] = \frac1{2\pi}\cdot\frac{\iiint(\sin\alpha+\sin\beta+\sin\gamma)^2\mathrm d\varphi_1\mathrm d\varphi_2\mathrm d\varphi_3}{\iiint|\sin\alpha+\sin\beta+\sin\gamma|\mathrm d\varphi_1\mathrm d\varphi_2\mathrm d\varphi_3}\;. $$

In the numerator, the integral over the mixed terms vanishes, leaving

$$ \iiint\left(\sin^2\alpha+\sin^2\beta+\sin^2\gamma\right)\mathrm d\varphi_1\mathrm d\varphi_2\mathrm d\varphi_3=\frac32(2\pi)^3\;. $$

In the denominator, by symmetry we can restrict to the $\varphi_i$ ordered counterclockwise (and thus $\alpha$, $\beta$, $\gamma$ positive) to get rid of the absolute value and obtain

\begin{eqnarray*} \iiint|\sin\alpha+\sin\beta+\sin\gamma|\,\mathrm d\varphi_1\mathrm d\varphi_2\mathrm d\varphi_3 &=& 2\cdot3\cdot2\pi\int_0^{2\pi}\int_0^{2\pi-\alpha}\sin\alpha\,\mathrm d\beta\,\mathrm d\alpha \\ &=& 2\cdot3\cdot2\pi\int_0^{2\pi}(2\pi-\alpha)\sin\alpha\,\mathrm d\alpha \\ &=& 2\cdot3\cdot(2\pi)^2\;. \end{eqnarray*}

Thus, with

$$ \frac1{2\pi}\cdot\frac{\frac32(2\pi)^3}{2\cdot3\cdot(2\pi)^2}=\frac14\;, $$

your numerical findings are confirmed.

joriki
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    I posted another question (and answer) using the density determined here. – joriki Jan 11 '24 at 08:54
  • Fascinating. But if you could elaborate a little on the part between calculating the Jacobian and the expectation as an integral, because it's not immediately clear to the naked eye. – dezdichado Jan 11 '24 at 23:53
  • @dezdichado: I'll be happy to, but I'm not sure which part exactly you're referring to. – joriki Jan 11 '24 at 23:55
  • I guess I am just interested to see how immediate it is that the expected value of ratio is the ratio of two expectations (or integrals). – dezdichado Jan 13 '24 at 04:49
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    @dezdichado: I see – that may be a misunderstanding. Those two ratios have nothing to do with each other. The ratio on the left, of the triangle area to the circle area, is invariant under scaling, so it's $\frac1{2\pi}$ times the area of the triangle with the same angles inscribed in the unit circle. The ratio on the right isn't a ratio of areas; the denominator is just a normalization constant that's required because the density had only been determined up to a constant factor. – joriki Jan 13 '24 at 09:30