There is a cube of side length with its center on the origin and its faces aligned with the standard coordinate axes.
There is a sphere of radius with its center at .
What percentage of the sphere's volume resides within the cube?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
I will rearrange things a bit to make it easier to "wrap my head around" this problem. Let's place the center of the sphere at ( 0 , 0 , 0 ) and the center of the cube at ( 0 . 5 , 1 . 5 , 1 ) (I'm permuting the coordinates). Now we seek the volume of the portion of the sphere with 1 . 5 ≥ x ≥ − 0 . 5 , y ≥ 0 . 5 and z ≥ 0 , which is simply the double integral ∫ − 0 . 5 1 . 5 ∫ 0 . 5 4 − x 2 4 − x 2 − y 2 d y d x ≈ 3 . 5 5 1 . With the volume of the sphere being 3 3 2 π ≈ 3 3 . 5 1 , the required percentage comes out to be about 1 0 . 6 % .
This is a lovely problem indeed: Not hard at all once one understands what is going on. Thank you for sharing!