How Does Your Garden Grow?

An Investigation In Dimension and Scaling Mark Eichenlaub April 11, 2011 (rev. June 26, 2012)

Seven sisters each want to plant a garden. They need to keep the rabbits out, so their father gives them each three meters of chicken wire for fencing. Lets each pick a different vegetable for our garden, Lily, the youngest, suggests. That way when theyre grown, we can all share. Wait, do you mean we should make individual gardens? asks, Francis, the middle sister, sounding as if she has a better idea. I thought we were going to combine our fences to make one big garden. That way we can grow more. Why would we be able to grow more with one big garden than seven little ones? Its the same amount of fence either way, so the gardens will be the same size. Well each do our own and mine will be the best chimes Kathlyn. Needless to say, she is the oldest. How can the sisters resolve their argument? Is the megagarden really bigger than seven little ones? There are many ways to solve this problem. For example, the sisters could use the formulas for the area and perimeter of a circle to calculate exactly how much land each garden has. If the sisters are clever, though, they might get by without all that work, just by drawing a picture. Because a circle can t six identical copies around its outside edge perfectly, seven individual gardens would look like this:

Theres a lot of fence wasted in the middle of the shape. The sisters would do much better to take all that extra fence and add it to the perimeter, making one large circle instead. So the sisters discover that a megagarden is better, but how much better? To answer this question, we will investigate an intriguing aspect of geometry the relationship between dimensions. Dimension is a word to count how many different directions there are. For example, the surface of the Earth is two-dimensional because you can go east/west or north/south. Any other direction, like south-south-west, is simply a combination of the primary ones. There are many two-dimensional spaces; you can recognize them as anything measured in terms of its area. A piece of paper, a projection on a screen, a mobius strip, or the walls in a room you are painting are all examples. Anything measured in terms of its length is one-dimensional. These things have only one direction to go - forward or backward (this counts as just one direction because, to mathematicians, forward*-1 = backwards). The radius of a circle, the perimeter of a rectangle, a line drawn on a page (whether straight or curvy), and the equator stretching around the Earths belly are all one-dimensional. Three dimensions means volume: the air in a room or the interior of a sphere. In three dimensions, you can choose to go up/down, forward/backward, and left/right. Three dimensions are the most that we interact with on a daily basis. The striking feature of dimensions is the way they are related to each other. Take the example of a square. We can measure the length of a side, which is one dimensional, or the area, which is two. If we have two squares and try to compare how much bigger one is than the other, the answer will depend on 2

whether we measure length or area, i.e. on which dimension we use. Take a look at the two squares below. The one in the right is three times as long on a side. Naively, we might expect it to have three times the area as well. It doesnt. The square on the right has nine times the area.

The big square is not just three times as wide; it is also three times as tall. So its area is nine times as much. The factor of three on the side length gets squared to form the new area. Similarly, if the big square ten times as long on a side, it would have one hundred times the area. Keep this in mind when you visit the Sistine Chapel. Although the ceiling is only about 32 times as long as a 48 inch by 16 inch poster reproduction, it is 1000 times the size! The relationship between the area and side length of a square is called a scaling relationship. We say that the area scales with the square of the side length. Next, lets look at a circle. To nd how big a circle is, we can measure its radius, diameter, or circumference. Lets choose a diameter. What happens to the area of a circle if we scale up its diameter by a factor of three?

To see the answer, put the circle inside a square.

The circle takes up a certain percentage of the area of the square (about 78.54%) regardless of the size. So if the big square has nine times the area of the small one, so must the big circle have nine times the area of the small circle. The same trick will work for any shape because it isnt the details of the shape that matter. What matters is that were comparing things with different dimensions. A side length and a diameter are one-dimensional, while areas of squares and circles are two-dimensional. Its the ratio of these dimensions - two to one - that tells us how much one will get bigger when the other grows. Because area is two-dimensional, it grows in two directions, and the area has a power of two compared to a length. That is why all the formulas youve ever seen for an area of something look like this: r2 4r2 6s2 2(1 + 2)l2 12 2 25 a area of a circle surface area of a sphere surface area of a cube area of a regular octogon area of a 5-cusped hypocycloid

Even if you dont know what these shapes are, aside from a bunch of pis, square roots, and other miscellaneous numbers, they all boil down to the taking a length and squaring it. This pattern continues in more dimensions. Volumes are three dimensional, and they scale with the cube of their lengths. This is why making scale models 4

1 of things is so effective. A 40 scale model looks only forty times smaller than the real thing, but it takes 403 = 64, 000 times less material to construct.

At last we can answer the sisters question. If the sisters combine their fencing, their gardens circumference will be seven times as long. Circumference is one dimensional, while area is two, so the megagarden will have 49 times as much area as a single garden. Even split seven ways, each sister still gets seven times as much land with the megagarden. If you think you have the hang of scaling and dimension, try this harder puzzle (the answer is at the end of the article): the seven sisters are joined by their mother and father. Their gardening complete, the family relaxes by blowing bubbles. All nine of them blow a single bubble each, all identical. In the air, the bubbles merge together to form one megabubble (with the same thickness as the small ones). Is its volume more or less than the combined volume the bubbles had before merging? By how much? Scaling with dimensions is everywhere in science. The idea of dimensions can be extended beyond lengths and areas to cover things like mass, time, and electric charge. Advanced dimensional analysis lends insight into such various topics as why mountains are as tall as they are, why elephants outlive mice, and how much energy is in a nuclear bomb. Exotic fractals have fractional dimensions and grant insight into chaos theory, but we will end with a simpler example of the power of thinking in scaling and dimension. Suppose we have a right triangle (one with a 90-degree angle in it). We label its sides A, B , and C .

By slicing it up, we can create two smaller versions of the same triangle. The hypotenuse (longest side) of the original triangle is C , and the hypotenuses of the smaller triangles are A and B .

The hypotenuse length is one dimensional, so we will have to square it to get the area of the triangles. We could make the formula Area = h2 is some number that we dont know; it depends on the exact shape of the triangle. The important point is that whatever that shape, the area scales with the square of the hypotenuse. The big triangle has hypotenuse C , so its area is Area = C 2 Similarly for the two smaller triangles. Because the two smaller triangles make up the bigger one, if we add the areas of the small triangles, we get the area of the big one. A2 + B 2 = C 2 6

Canceling out the factor from this equation we get A2 + B 2 = C 2 This is the Pythagorean theorem, the most important result in Euclidean geometry! How wonderful that it comes from a simple argument about gardens.

Answer to puzzle
When the nine bubbles merge, the megabubble has nine times the surface area of a single small bubble. That means it has three times the radius. A bubble with three times the radius will have 3 3 = 27 times the volume of a single small bubble. Since there were nice such bubbles, the megabubble has 27 9 =3 times the volume the small bubbles had combined before merging.