How many sides does a circle have ?

Sides does a circle: On May 10 2020 Australia had a very serious question as a nation it collectively needed to know How many sides does a circle have the answer is a little more nuanced than it may seem there’s the easy math answer the real-life answer and the answer that’s part hard math and part real-life listen the answer can be pretty straight forward if you’re lazy or if you want to stick to the most basic math a polygon is a two-dimensional shape on a plane that has a defined number of sides or actually angles it’s right in the name the greek polygon means many angled triangle is a trigon three angles tridecagon 13 angles and 13 sides.

Assuming you mean by “circle” its outline alongside its inside, then, at that point, its limit is that perimeter. It’s a bend, drawn underneath in dark. You can call that limit aside, and all things considered, a circle has one side.

How many sides does a circle have?

Looking at a circle you aren’t seeing any angles you’re really just seeing one continuous side there’s the first answer a circle has one side the end right wrong what is aside this is where it gets tricky in math aside is really an edge or a face depending on whether we’re working on two or three dimensions but in real life aside is a side you refer to the left side of your body or the side of a ship or the outside and inside of your house side in old English pretty much set the tone for how we think of the word it meant the left or right flank of a person but when we think about what aside is it’s always relative to the whole humans have bilateral symmetry so the left of your body is a mirror image of the right, for the most part, that whole unit your body means.

We can break it down into relative sides and have it make sense a side is about position relative to something greater like a side dish of your meal is relative to the main dish of the meal the steak or whatever spaghetti hot dogs you know what I mean you can’t have the port side of a ship without drawing a mental line of symmetry lengthwise in its center you can’t talk about how the inside of your thigh hurts without silently differentiating it from the obvious outside of your leg or let’s talk about starfish look at a starfish because that’s radial symmetry coming from the center outward it’s got ten faces with two on each arm but we say it has five sides and each of those sides has a left side and a right side so it’s got five sides or ten sides depending on how we’re breaking it down it’s positional it’s directional it’s relative but we’re supposed to be talking about circles circles okay all right well now we’ve got at least one more answer a circle’s got an inside and an outside two totally legitimate sides.

But that’s probably wrong because what about wheels wheels you’ve got a circle and it’s rolling on a flat surface between gravity and friction eventually it stops let’s imagine a wheel as a perfect circle because it’s a perfect circle and the surface is perfectly flat the actual point of contact between the two is infinitesimal in size does that make the point of contact aside probably and how many are there I could roll a circle ten thousand times and it’s never gonna stop in the exact same place that suggests there are infinite signs just like the coast of the continent that feverishly wished for an answer to this very question the coast of Australia is infinitely long don’t, believe me, you should imagine measuring the coastline of Australia using a measuring stick 20 kilometers long then you go back and measure it with a one-kilometer measuring stick the measurement would actually be significantly longer because you’re able to capture more detail in the twists and turns of the coastline.

If you did it by the meter even more centimeter millimeter nanometers or femtometer the smaller your unit of measurement the more you reduce the uncertainty and increase that coastline and if your unit of measurement can become infinitely small then how does the coastline not become infinitely large it’s the same exact concept with sides of a circle we’ve got an infinite number of points at which a circle can come to rest as it’s rolling on a plane and the only limitation we have is in our ability to measure it so how many sides would it have if we could count the atoms or the electrons or the quarks sorry Australia but how many sides do.

A circle just doesn’t have a definitive answer depending on how you look at the problem a circle can have no sides one side two sides or infinite sides so what side are you on how many sides do you think a circle has?