A gardener with a keen interest in mathematics was very interested in the shapes made by the curves
and
, and wanted to make that shape on the hedges in the garden. He wants to make the 'bird' shape out of an hedge, which stretches to infinity on a Cartesian plane. The gardener can do an infinite number of cuts, but every cut is a line. Since he can't make curved cuts, he will not be able to make the shape perfectly, however, using straight cuts, he can make a figure as close to the original outline as possible. If he cannot cut into the 'bird', let the area of the figure he can create be
.
Find . The first few cuts are shown in the diagram.
This is part of the Sinusoidal, Cosinusoidal series
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It's exactly 4 only if the gardener is able to shape the hedges exactly along the curves. However, using only long straight cuts, it's not possible to shape the hedges exactly along the curves, since a straight line through the intersection of the two curves has a tangent point to one of the curves elsewhere. This means there will be a very tiny extra area added to this 4 , about 0 . 0 7 2 6 1 3 3 , so that the answer can't be an exact integer.