Reuleaux triangle

A Reuleaux triangle is a shape formed from the intersection of three circular disks, each having its center on the boundary of the other two. Its boundary is a curve of constant width, the simplest and best known such curve other than the circle itself. Constant width means that the separation of every two parallel supporting lines is the same, independent of their orientation. Because all its diameters are the same, the Reuleaux triangle is one answer to the question 'Other than a circle, what shape can a manhole cover be made so that it cannot fall down through the hole?' Reuleaux triangles have also been called spherical triangles, but that term more properly refers to triangles on the curved surface of a sphere.They are named after Franz Reuleaux, a 19th-century German engineer who pioneered the study of machines for translating one type of motion into another, and who used Reuleaux triangles in his designs. However, these shapes were known before his time, for instance by the designers of Gothic church windows, by Leonardo da Vinci, who used it for a map projection, and by Leonhard Euler in his study of constant-width shapes. Other applications of the Reuleaux triangle include giving the shape to guitar picks, pencils, and drill bits for drilling square holes, as well as in graphic design in the shapes of some signs and corporate logos. Among constant-width shapes with a given width, the Reuleaux triangle has the minimum area and the sharpest (smallest) possible angle (120°) at its corners. By several numerical measures it is the farthest from being centrally symmetric. It provides the largest constant-width shape avoiding the points of an integer lattice, and is closely related to the shape of the quadrilateral maximizing the ratio of perimeter to diameter. It can perform a complete rotation within a square while at all times touching all four sides of the square, and has the smallest possible area of shapes with this property. However, although it covers most of the square in this rotation process, it fails to cover a small fraction of the square's area, near its corners. Because of this property of rotating within a square, the Reuleaux triangle is also sometimes known as the Reuleaux rotor. The Reuleaux triangle is the first of a sequence of Reuleaux polygons, whose boundaries are curves of constant width formed from regular polygons with an odd number of sides. Some of these curves have been used as the shapes of coins. The Reuleaux triangle can also be generalized into three dimensions in multiple ways: the Reuleaux tetrahedron (the intersection of four balls whose centers lie on a regular tetrahedron) does not have constant width, but can be modified by rounding its edges to form the Meissner tetrahedron, which does. Alternatively, the surface of revolution of the Reuleaux triangle also has constant width. The Reuleaux triangle may be constructed either directly from three circles, or by rounding the sides of an equilateral triangle. The three-circle construction may be performed with a compass alone, not even needing a straightedge. By the Mohr–Mascheroni theoremthe same is true more generally of any compass-and-straightedge construction, but the construction for the Reuleaux triangle is particularly simple.The first step is to mark two arbitrary points of the plane (which will eventually become vertices of the triangle), and use the compass to draw a circle centered at one of the marked points, through the other marked point. Next, one draws a second circle, of the same radius, centered at the other marked point and passing through the first marked point.Finally, one draws a third circle, again of the same radius, with its center at one of the two crossing points of the two previous circles, passing through both marked points. The central region in the resulting arrangement of three circles will be a Reuleaux triangle. Alternatively, a Reuleaux triangle may be constructed from an equilateral triangle T by drawing three arcs of circles, each centered at one vertex of T and connecting the other two vertices.Or, equivalently, it may be constructed as the intersection of three disks centered at the vertices of T, with radius equal to the side length of T. The most basic property of the Reuleaux triangle is that it has constant width, meaning that for every pair of parallel supporting lines (two lines of the same slope that both touch the shape without crossing through it) the two lines have the same Euclidean distance from each other, regardless of the orientation of these lines. In any pair of parallel supporting lines, one of the two lines will necessarily touch the triangle at one of its vertices. The other supporting line may touch the triangle at any point on the opposite arc, and their distance (the width of the Reuleaux triangle) equals the radius of this arc.