A Tale of the Cycloid In Four Acts

Carlo Margio

Figure 1: A point on a wheel tracing a cycloid, from a work by Pascal in 16589.

Introduction
In the words of Mersenne, a cycloid is “the curve traced in space by a point on a carriage
wheel as it revolves, moving forward on the street surface.” 1
This deceptively simple curve has a large number of remarkable and unique properties
from an integral ratio of its length to the radius of the generating circle, and an integral
ratio of its enclosed area to the area of the generating circle, as can be proven using
geometry or basic calculus, to the advanced and unique tautochrone and brachistochrone
properties, that are best shown using the calculus of variations. Thrown in to this
assortment, a cycloid is the only curve that is its own involute.
Study of the cycloid can reinforce the curriculum concepts of curve parameterisation,
length of a curve, and the area under a parametric curve. Being mechanically generated,
the cycloid also lends itself to practical demonstrations that help visualise these abstract
concepts.
The history of the curve is as enthralling as the mathematics, and involves many of the
great European mathematicians of the seventeenth century (See Appendix I
“Mathematicians and Timeline”). Introducing the cycloid through the persons involved in
its discovery, and the struggles they underwent to get credit for their insights, not only
gives sequence and order to the cycloid’s properties and shows which properties required
advances in mathematics, but it also gives a human face to the mathematicians involved
and makes them seem less remote, despite their, at times, seemingly superhuman
discoveries.

The History of the Cycloid: A Who’s Who of Seventeenth Century European

Mathematics
This intellectually rewarding, and mathematically beautiful curve led to such heated
disputes, that the cycloid has been called the “Helen of geometers,” or the “Apple of
discord” 10, both references to the epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, in which Helen’s
beauty “launched a thousand ships” and led to years of war.
Act 1: Early history and Galileo’s influence.
There are differing opinions as to who first discovered or invented the cycloid, and some
authors believe that the curve must have been known to ancient Greek geometers seeing
Archimedes, among others, describes mechanically generated curves such as his spiral.
Also Hipparchus used an epicycle, the curve traced by a point on a circle that rolls around
the circumference of another circle, to describe the motion of the Moon. There is, however,
no surviving evidence that the Greeks explicitly knew of the cycloid. Over 1700 years
later, Albrecht Dürer, the German artist, also studied an epicycle5, but did not generalise
this to a regular cycloid. Dürer, whose interests were mainly geometric, did not have the
mathematical background required to investigate the epicycle deeply.

Figure 2: (Left) Dürer’s epicycle drawing compass2. (Right) An epicycloid.

Charles de Bovelles described an actual cycloid in 150110, but he considered it to be

merely a circle with five-fourths the radius of the generating circle13. Galileo Galilei gave
the cycloid its name, from the Greek for circle-like, and was the first to draw widespread
attention to it. He wrote to Cavalieri in 1640 that he had been thinking about the curve for
over fifty years. In 1599, to estimate the area of the cycloid, Galileo cut the shape of the
curve out of sheet metal and compared the weight of the cycloid to the weight of the
generating circle. He came to the conclusion that the cycloid area was a little less than
three times the area of the generating circle13. A teaching activity in Appendices II and IV
allows students to draw a cycloid using a compass and ruler, and then reproduces Galileo’s
experiment with cardboard shapes.

Figure 3: (Left) A mobile phone light attached to a bicycle wheel. (Right) Cycloid traced using a time-exposure photograph3.
A cycloid can also be generated by taking a time exposure photograph of a light attached to
the rim of a wheel. An activity for lower grades using this technique is described in
Appendix III.
Galileo also suggested that the cycloid would be a suitable shape for the arch of a bridge10.
Galileo’s disciple, Vincenzo Viviani, used a cycloid in his design for the arch of a bridge
over the River Arzana in Sardinia11. This bridge is no longer standing, but below is shown
some modern day architecture using cycloids.

Figure 4: (Top) Cycloidal arches at the Kimbell Art Museum, Forth Worth, Texas8.

(Bottom) Stone bridge in Skopje.

Two other disciples of Galileo, Bonaventura Cavalieri and Evangelista Torricelli, also
studied the cycloid. Torricelli found the area under the curve and published his derivation
in his 1644 book on geometry. He wrote, “One now asks what proportion the cycloidal
space has to its generating circle. We demonstrate (and may thanks be given to God) that it
is triple4”. His thanks perhaps were tempered somewhat when this publication led to a
savage literary attack from Gille de Roberval, as we will soon see.

Act 2: The French connection.

Marin Mersenne, was born a peasant but trained at a Jesuit college. He likely heard of the
cycloid from Galileo, with whom he corresponded. Mersenne hosted a small gathering of
mathematicians twice weekly at his home, and at one such meeting in 1628, he put to
Roberval the problem of finding the area under the arch of a cycloid13. Roberval
accomplished this in 1634 by finding the companion curve shown in Figure 5. The
companion curve AQD divides rectangle BDCA in two equal parts. Using Cavalieri’s
principle, the shaded area APDQ has the same area as the half circle AEBF because
horizontal cross-sections of both shapes are always of the same length. Cavalieri’s
principle can be visualised in three dimensions by picturing a vertical stack of coins. The
volume of the stack will be unchanged if it is skewed to one side. So looking again at
Roberval’s diagram, AC is half the circle circumference because it is traversed by one half
rotation. Using, as is customary, a for the radius of generating circle, the area enclosed by
half of the cycloid arch is half the area of rectangle BDAC, πa2, plus half the area of the
generating circle, 0.5 πa2; a total of 1.5 πa2. Therefore the whole arch has and area of 3πa2,
three times the area of the generating circle.

Figure 5: (Left) Roberval’s companion curve4.

(Right) Visualisation of Cavalieri’s principle3.

Roberval, being secretive, did not publish his result, but communicated it privately to some
French colleagues. Descartes on receiving Roberval’s proof said somewhat dismissively,
“Roberval has laboured overmuch to produce so small a result.” 10
As mentioned, Torricelli in 1644 published his also correct determination of the area under
a cycloid, ten years after Roberval found the result. Even though Roberval had gone to
great lengths to keep his method secret, he was convinced that Torricelli had stolen the
proof, and Roberval savagely attacked Torricelli in a widely circulated letter. Torricelli set
about collecting documents to clear his name, but unfortunately he died of typhoid in 1647
before he could publish them. His dying request was that the documents be published, but
frustratingly, possibly because of the infectious disease, his wish was not honoured and
many of the documents were lost. Other documents, however, came to light around 1900
that seem bear out Torricelli’s claim7.
Descartes, after ridiculing Roberval, went on to find the tangent by a beautifully simple
construct.

Figure 6: A pentagon rolled along a line13.

Descartes intriguing proof starts by showing that when rolling a pentagon on a line, the
curve traced by a fixed point at a vertex, is always tangent to the line joining the vertex and
the point where the pentagon touches the base line. He reasoned that by letting the number
of sides approach infinity, the polygon would approach a circle, and the curve traced by the
fixed point on the circle would still be tangent to the line joining this fixed point and the
point at which the circle makes contact with the base line.
 Figure 7: Descartes tangent method13.

Desarte challenged Fermat and Roberval to also find the tangent. Fermat succeeded;
Roberval failed. Viviani, you may recall, also found the tangent to the cycloid, possibly
using the alternative method of combining velocities.
Descartes was of the opinion that the length of a cycloid could never be known.12 The
cycloid, it seemed, had little more to offer, but Pascal had other ideas.
Act 3: Enter fleet-footed Pascal.
In 1654 Blaise Pascal had a religious vision and withdrew from secular society to Port
Royal, where he made seminal contributions to theological literature, and to the ideals of
serving those in need, but he largely abandoned science and mathematics. In the Iliad
metaphor, Pascal is Achilles: a sometimes unwilling warrior with such lavish natural talent
that when he entered the fray, the course of the battle turned. And so one evening in 1658,
Pascal, suffering from a particularly bad toothache, turned his mind to the cycloid to avoid
thinking of the pain. He took it as a sign of approval from God that the pain abated, and so
spent the next eight days discovering nearly all the remaining geometric properties of the
cycloid including its centre of mass, and volume of revolution. He circulated his results in
the form of a contest with a cash prize. There were only two entrants, John Wallis and Père
Lalouère, but their work was judged insufficiently complete to win the prize. A number of
mathematicians, however, including Fermat, Huygens, Ricci, Sluse, and Wren sent their
discoveries privately to Pascal. Wren successfully calculated the length. Pascal published
L’Histoire de la Roulette (History of the Cycloid) with his solutions and other results.
This above account is contested by Bold1, who claims that Pascal only partially withdrew
from mathematics during his time at Port Royal, and that he continued correspondence
with Sluse and Huygens. Bold also notes that there are two differing accounts for Pascal’s
motivation for publishing his results, and that Wallis and Lalouère were outraged when a
commission headed by Pierre de Carcavi, an associate of Pascal, rejected their solutions.
The final act: The curve that modernised itself.
The cycloid had two remaining wonders to bestow on humanity, and these properties are
both the most fundamental, and the most surprising of all.
1. The tautochrone is a cycloid. (The isochrone is a cycloid too.)
In the 1650s, Huygens, worked on developing an accurate pendulum clock by extending
Galileo’s work with pendulums. Finding an accurate clock was of paramount importance at
this time in history. Ocean going trade was becoming vital to many countries, including
Huygens own Netherlands, and yet, at that time, mariners could not determine their
longitude while at sea. Having an accurate time would allow navigators to use the current
position of the Sun or the stars to determine their longitude. Around 1657 Huygens was
looking for a pendulum that took the same time to complete a single swing regardless of
the amplitude of the swing — a tautochrone from the Greek tauto (same) and chronos
(time). A solid rod pendulum takes longer to complete a swing if the amplitude of the
swing is larger. Using a string pendulum and putting nails in a board, Huygens found that
he could approximate the tautochrone experimentally. On seeing Pascal’s challenge,
Huygens realised the path of his experimental pendulum was a cycloid.

Figure 8: (Left) Huygens’s experiment to find tautochrone using a string pendulum and nails in a board4.

Another, perhaps more interesting related result, is the isochrone property, and that is that a
mass released from any point on a cycloid will take the same time to reach the bottom of
the cycloid

Figure 9: Mass A and mass C will both reach position B at the same time6.

In the process of constructing an exactly cycloidal pendulum, Huygens proved that the
cycloid is its own involute. That is to say, when stretching a string around a cycloid, the
end of the string travels on a cycloidal path. The cycloid is the only curve with this
property.

Figure 10: (Left) Huygens’s own sketch of his cycloid pendulum, showing the cycloid shaped cheeks5.
(Right) The cycloid is its own involute6.

2. The brachistochrone is a cycloid — the best was saved until last.

In 1696 Johann Bernoulli challenged the mathematical community to find the path between
two points on which a mass will descend under gravity in the shortest time. This path is
called the brachistochrone from the Greek brachistos (shortest) and chronos (time).
Solutions were submitted by Johann Bernoulli himself, by his brother Jakob Bernoulli, by
Gottfried Leibniz, and, under a pseudonym, by Isaac Newton. The competition was worded
to be a direct affront to Newton, but legend has it that Newton received the challenge in the
afternoon, laboured all night, and sent off the solution the next morning. The most
interesting solution, however, was put forward by Jakob Bernoulli who developed the
Calculus of Variations to solve the problem. Arguably this technique led to the entire
disciple of modern quantum electrodynamics, but that is another tale.

Figure 11: New York artist Raphaël Zarka constructed a cycloid shape skateboard ramp for his “Free Ride” installation. The ramp
allows the rider to travel between two points on the surface (if they are perpendicular to the end) in the shortest time.14

List of Appendices
Appendix I — Mathematicians and Timeline.
Appendix II — Resources to draw a cycloid.
Appendix III — Drawing a cycloid using a light attached to a wheel.
Appendix IV — Activities with completed cycloid.
Appendix V — Derivation of length and area of cycloid.
Appendix VI — Extension and enrichment activities.

(All subsequent photographs and diagrams by Margio, 2017)

Appendix I — Mathematicians and Timeline.
• Archimedes of Siracusa, ca. 230 BC — described mechanical curves such as his spiral,
and some authors feel he would have known of the cycloid. There is, however, no extant
evidence of this.
• Iamblichus Chalcidensis, ca. 300 AD — Syrian philosopher and mathematician who
describes mechanical curves but no extant evidence of description of cycloid.
• Nicholas de Cusa, ca. 1450 — named by Wren as discoverer of the cycloid, but Wren
was either mistaken or the evidence has been lost.
• Charles de Bovelles, 1503 — gave first verified description of the cycloid in Introductio
in geometriam, but he incorrectly thought the cycloid was part of a larger circle.
• Albrecht Dürer, 1525 — described an epicycloid (not a regular cycloid).
• Galileo Galilei, ca. 1599 — named and popularised the cycloid.
• Bonaventura Cavalieri, ca. 1630 — disciple of Galileo. Work on indivisibles and
developed Cavalieri’s principle.
• Marin Mersenne, 1628 — proposed area problem to Roberval.
• Gilles de Roberval, 1634 — found, using a companion curve, the area to be three times
that of the generating circle.
• René Descartes, 1634 — challenged Roberval and Fermat to find the tangent. Descartes
claimed the length would never be known.
• Pierre de Fermat, 1638 — correctly found the tangent to the cycloid when challenged to
do so by Descartes.
• Vincenzo Viviani, ca. 1640 — designed a bridge using a cycloid. Found the equation for
the tangent.
• Evangelista Torricelli, ca. 1644 — found area independently of Roberval.
• Girard Desargues, ca. 1640 — realised that cycloidal shaped teeth on a gear wheel give a
constant driving force rather then the pulsed force of triangular shaped teeth.
• Blaise Pascal, 1658 — under the pseudonym “Amos Dettonville,” issued a challenge and
offered a prize to find most remaining geometric properties of the cycloid.
• René-François de Sluse, ca. 1658 — correspondent with Pascal while Pascal was at Port
Royal, and responded privately to Pascal’s competition.
• John Wallis, ca. 1658 — responded to Pascal’s challenge but along with Lalouère, was
outraged when commission headed by Carcavi rejected the solution. Found the arc length
to be 8 times the radius of the generating circle.
• Père Lalouère, ca. 1658 — responded to Pascal’s challenge but his solution was deemed
 incomplete by a panel. He also protested loudly.
• Sluse, ca. 1658 — communicated solution to Pascal challenge directly to Pascal.
• Christopher Wren, ca. 1658— responded privately to a competitions posed by Pascal.
• Christiaan Huygens, 1659 — built a clock using an approximately tautochrone curve that
he found experimentally; 1673 –– found tautochrone property of cycloid, and that a
cycloid is its own involute and evolute.
• Johann Bernoulli, 1692 — showed that a cycloid is the brachistochrone using Fermat’s
principal of least distance for light; 1696 –– in Acta eruditorum issued challenge to find
the brachistochrone.
• Jakob Bernoulli, 1692 —found that the cycloid is the catacaustic of a circle; 1696 ––
invented calculus of variation to solve brachistochrone problem and entered a fierce
debate with his brother for priority.
• Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 1696 — participated with Johann Bernoulli in issuing
challenge to Newton but later denied involvement.
• Isaac Newton, ca. 1696 — responded to Bernoulli’s challenge reputedly overnight.
• L’Hôpital, 1696 — solved Bernoulli’s challenge.
• Joseph-Louis Lagrange, 1755 to 1788— used calculus of variations for the
brachistochrone problem and generalised analytical mechanics.
Appendix II — Resources to draw a cycloid.
Here are two alternative ways to draw a cycloid. Method I involves printing out a
framework template, whereas Method II guides you through the drawing of the framework
from scratch, using a more tradition protractor and ruler method.
Both methods allow you to find 12 points on the cycloid curve using either a compass or,
more intuitively, a cutout of the generating circle.
Method 1 — Draw a cycloid on a template (quick method).
Method 1 is suitable for classes that have only a short time for this activity.

Step 1 — Print out the template provided on A3 paper.

• Print out the template on the template provided, preferably on A3 paper. The template
can be glued to Bristol Board to allow construction of a more substantial cycloid.

The horizontal lines of the template have been generated to match twelve even
divisions of the generating circle circumference as shown below, and so they match
the height of the generating point as the generating circle rolls to each successive
location.

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Step 2 — Use a compass centred on C0 to C12 to mark 12 points on the cycloid.

• Set a compass to have the same radius as the generating circle.
• Successively place the centre (point) of the compass on the marked centres C0 to
C12, and draw a short arc on one of the horizontal lines. To decide which
horizontal line to mark, picture the generating circle rolling along the base line, and
its centre resting at each successive labelled centre point. The generating point on
the circumference of the circle will move initially from the base line to the next
highest cross line, one step at a time, until the circle reaches the halfway point.
Until the halfway point, draw the mark to the left of the centre of the circle. After
the halfway point proceed to mark the descending horizontal lines, but make the
mark to the right of the centre of the compass.

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Alternative Step 2 — Mark points on the cycloid curve using a cutout of the generating
wheel.
• Cut out the generating wheel from the printed template.
• Place the wheel with the arrow pointing downward at the zero marked on the base
line.
• “Roll” the generating wheel along the base line aligning the numbers on the
generating circle with the numbers on the base line. At each position mark on the
bottom sheet, the point indicated by the tip of the arrow on the generating wheel.
The arrow serves to mark the position of the generating point on the wheel.

Step 3— Use a French curve template to complete the cycloid.

French curves are segments of the Euler Spiral, and worth studying in their own right. Here
a French curve template is used, as often in traditional drafting, to get a smooth curve
joining three points.
• Placing the French curve template on three successive cycloid points. Slide it left or
right until the edge of the curve passes through all three points.
• Trace along the edge of the template to draw a short segment of the cycloid curve.
Short segments work best.
Here is a plot of the finished curve.

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↑ ��
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�
�
�
�
Method 1 — Draw a cycloid on a template (quick method).

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Method 2 — Draw a cycloid from scratch using a compass and ruler.
Galileo and other geometers likely drew a cycloid using a technique similar to the one
detailed here.

Materials
• Flouro board (Bristol board) cardboard.
• Half-circle protractor (full circle would be better if you have one).
• Large set square.
• Metre rule, or just a straightedge since we can measure with the set square.
• Compass.
• French curve set.
• Pencil and eraser.
Step 1 — Draw two circles and a base line.
• Using a 15.6 cm diameter half-circular protractor draw a full circle. (Note: the
protractor is sold as 15 cm, but the scale on the base does not extend all the way to
the circumference.)
• Mark 6 evenly spaced tick marks (30˚ separation) on the inner face of the circle.

• Use a long straightedge to draw a base line, and measure a length of 2πa along the
line, where a is the radius of the generating circle (2πa = 49 cm in this case).
• Divided the base line into 12 equal segments using the ruler.
• Draw a second circle on the far side of the base line and similarly mark 6 evenly
spaced tick marks on its inner face.
Step 2 — Join the tick marks on both circles.
• Join the corresponding points on both circles.

Step 3 — Divide the line joining the centres of the circles into 12 segments.

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• Now used the set square moving along the base line to duplicate the 12 equal length
line segments. Or if you prefer, measure the segments afresh using a ruler. Label
the centres C0 to C12. You now have a completed framework on which to draw the
cycloid curve.
Step 4 — For the remaining steps proceed as in Method I.
Here are some images of the process.
• Marking points on the cycloid using a compass.

• Alternatively, marking points on the cycloid using a cutout generating circle.

• Joining the points on the cycloid using a French curve.

• The completed cycloid.

Appendix III — Drawing a cycloid using a light attached to a wheel.
For younger classes here is a simpler and perhaps more engaging way of getting a cycloid
shape and the generating circle.

(Left) A mobile phone light attached to a bicycle wheel.

(Right) Cycloid traced using a time-exposure photograph.

• Using duct tape, attach a mobile phone or other LED light source to the rim of a
detached bicycle wheel.
• Set up a camera on a tripod, in a darkened laboratory. Use the bulb shutter setting
B, so that when the shutter button is press, the shutter remains open until the button
is pressed a second time.
• Holding the axel of the bicycle wheel, roll the wheel in front of the camera.
• Close the camera shutter and check the photograph.
• Take a second photograph of the bicycle wheel being careful to place it at the same
distance from the camera as in the first photograph.
The photographs can now be uploaded to a computer and printed on A4 sheets of paper.
Cut out the images of the bicycle wheel and the cycloid and proceed to analyse them using
the activities in Appendix IV.
Appendix IV — Activities with completed cycloid.

Galileo’s experiment to find ratio of areas.

Following in the footsteps of Galileo, compare the weight of the generating circle, to that
of the cycloid arch.

Using an accurate balance the result was the following:

Mass of generating circle 4.38 g
Mass of cycloid arch 13.20 g
Probably by good fortune, the ratio found was 3.01, an error of around 0.5 %.
Simple comparison of ratio of cycloid length to the generating circle diameter.
The cycloid cut-out can be compared to the generating circle diameter to get a rough
approximation of the ratio. We see that it is around four diameters, or 8a.
More careful comparison of ratio of cycloid length to generating circle diameter.
Step 1 — Place a length of string in correspondence with the length of the cycloid and cut
it to length.

Step 2 — Compare the string length to the diameter of the generating circle.

The result is very close to 4 generating circle diameters, or 8a.

Appendix IV— Derivation of length and area of a cycloid.

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Carlo Margio 2017-10-11

To get a parametric curve for the cycloid, picture the generating wheel moving along the base line
and rotating at the correct speed to roll without slipping. We need an equation of motion for the fixed
generating point on the wheel.

Say the generating wheel has a radius a, and that it takes 2π seconds to complete one revolution.
During this time it advances a distance of 2 π a. So the forward motion of the centre of the circle can
be parameterized as:
xtrans (t) = a t t ϵ [0, 2 π]
ytrans (t) = a

π
Now the rotation is clockwise starting from - 2 and will complete one revolution in the same 2π
seconds time. The parameter t is multiplied by negative 1 because and increasing argument to sine
and cosine give anti-clockwise rotation.
π
xrot (t) = a cos - 2 - t t ϵ [0, 2 π]
π
yrot (t) = a sin - 2 - t
Using properties of sine and cosine, we can rewrite this as
xrot (t) = -a sin( t) t ϵ [0, 2 π]
yrot (t) = -a cos(t)

Adding the translational and rotation motion we get

x(t) = a t - a sin(t) t ϵ [0, 2 π]
y(t) = a - a cos(t)
or
x(t) = a [ t - sin(t)] t ϵ [0, 2 π]
y(t) = a [1 - cos(t)]
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Carlo Margio 2017-10-11
Starting from the parametric equation
x(t) = a [ t - sin(t)] t ϵ [0, 2 π]
y(t) = a [1 - cos(t)]
the length of one arch is
dx 2 dy 2
L= dt
+ dt
ⅆt

2π
= ∫0 a2 (1 - cos(t))2 + a2 (sin(t))2 ⅆt
2π
= a ∫0 cos2 (t) - 2 cos(t) + 1 + sin2 (t) ⅆt
2π
= a ∫0 2 - 2 cos(t) ⅆ t
2π
=a 2 ∫0 1 - cos(t) ⅆt
t
Using the trigonometric identity 2 sin2 2
= 1 - cos(t)

2π t
L=a 2 ∫0 2 sin2 2
ⅆt
2π t
= 2 a ∫0 sin 2
ⅆt
t 2π
= 2 a -2 cos 2 0
= -4 a [cos(π) - cos(0)]
= -4 a [-1 - 1]
L=8a
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Carlo Margio 2017-10-11

The area under a parametric curve is

A = ∫ y(x) ⅆx
dx
= ∫ y(t) dt
ⅆt
Using the parametric form of the cycloid
x(t) = a [ t - sin(t)] t ϵ [0, 2 π]
y(t) = a [1 - cos(t)]
We get
dx
A = ∫ y(t) dt
ⅆt
2π
= ∫0 a[1 - cos(t)] a(1 - cos(t)) ⅆt
2π
= a2 ∫0 (1 - cos(t))2 ⅆt
2π
= a2 ∫0 1 - 2 cos(t) + cos2 (t) ⅆt
The first two terms are easily integrated, and for the last term we use the identity
1 1
cos2 (t) = 2 + 2 cos(2 t)
2π 1 1
A = a2 ∫0 1 - 2 cos(t) + 2
+ 2 cos(2 t) ⅆt
2π 3 1
= a 2 ∫0 2
- 2 cos(t) + 2 cos(2 t) ⅆt
3 1
= a2 2 t - 2 sin(t) + 4 sin(2 t) 20 π
3
= a2 2 2 π
2
A=3πa
Now the area of generating circle is π a2 , so the area under the arch of a cycloid is 3 times the area
of the generating circle.
Appendix V — Extension and enrichment activities.

Class activity
A class activity for all levels using their cycloid cut-outs.
• Arrange it so that different individuals or groups receive different sized cycloid by
printing their templates or photo images at different scales.
• Create a spread sheet where all class members or groups can enter the following:
o weight of their cycloid
o weight the generating circle
o ratio of the arch length to the radius of the generating.
• Ask them to plot the weight of the cycloid versus the weight of the generating
circle. They should get a slope of around three, demonstrating that the area of a
cycloid is three times the area of the generating circle.
• Ask them to find the average of the ratio of the arch length to the radius of the
generating circle, and for more advance classes the standard deviation as well. They
should get an average of about eight. The smaller the standard deviation the better.

Enrichment activities
• More advanced students can be walked through the mathematical derivations of the
cycloid length, and the area under the curve as shown in Appendix IV.
• More advanced students can also be asked to find the volume of revolution of the
cycloid.
• Investigate the applications of for example that cycloidal shaped teeth on a gear
wheel give a constant driving force rather then the pulsed force of triangular shaped
teeth.
• A look at the calculus of variations that Jakob Bernoulli invented to solve the
brachistochrone problem.
Australian Curriculum Links
Year 10.
As a motivation to further explore calculus in senior years, or as enrichment for advanced
students with interest in calculs.
Graphing extension activity:
The extension class activity where the plot the weight of a cycloid versus the weight of the
generating circle.
Explore the connection between algebraic and graphical representations of relations
such as simple quadratics, circles and exponentials using digital technology as
appropriate (ACMNA239)

Mathematic Specialist ATAR Course Year 12 syllabus 2017.

The enrichment activity could lead more advanced students into the calculus of
variations.
Vector and Cartesian equations:
use vector equations of curves in two or three dimensions involving a parameter, and
determine a ‘corresponding’ Cartesian equation in the two-dimensional case
(ACMSM104)
Vector calculus:
consider position of vectors as a function of time (ACMSM111)
Applications of integral calculus:
calculate areas between curves determined by functions (ACMSM124)
Integration techniques:
integrate using the trigonometric identities
(ACMSM116)
References
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lab.kr/prof/2007_01.pdf
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