Figures Circumscribing Circles

1. INTRODUCTION. The centroid of the boundary of an arbitrary triangle need not be at the same point as the centroid of its interior. But we have discovered that the two centroids are always collinear with the center of the inscribed circle, at distances in the ratio 3 : 2 from the center. We thought this charming fact must surely be known, but could find no mention of it in the literature. This paper generalizes this elegant and surprising result to any polygon that circumscribes a circle (Theorem 6). A key ingredient of the proof is a link to Archimedes' striking discovery concerning the area of a circular disk [4, p. 91], which for our purposes we prefer to state as follows: