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Vamshi Jandhyala

Mathematics

Expected Distance of a Random Point from the Centre of a Regular Polygon

Closed form for the expected distance from the centre of a regular n-gon of unit circumradius, via a Jacobian substitution on one fundamental triangle; three triangle-sampling methods for computational verification.

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Pick a point uniformly at random in a regular nn-gon with circumradius one. What is the expected distance to the centre? The Jacobian substitution x=u,y=uvx = u, y = uv reduces the double integral to a tractable product, giving a closed form that evaluates to 0.4600.460 for n=3n=3 and 0.5410.541 for n=4n=4. The PDF includes three methods for sampling uniformly from a triangle (parallelogram, Kraemer, inverse CDF) and Python code verifying the closed form.


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