The area of the square is . What’s the missing length?
With the points labelled as in the above diagram, let have length , have length , and let be the radius of the smaller semi-circle. Let be the length of . As the square has area , it has side length .
As the angle between a radius and tangent is , triangle is right-angled so Pythagoras' theorem applies and shows that:
So .
Angle is as it is the angle in a semi-circle, so triangles and are similar. This means that the ratio of the lengths of to is equal to that of to . That is, . This rearranges to and so .
The missing length is therefore .