MENSURATION Pappus, born at Alexandria, Egypt is the last of the great Greek geometers. Pappus major work ‘Synagoge’ or ‘The Mathematical Collection’ is a collection of mathematical writings in eight books. He described the principles of levers, pulleys, wedges, axles and screws. These concepts are widely applied in Physics and modern Engineering Science.
“Nature is an infinite sphere of which the centre is everywhere and the circumference nowhere”. - Blaise Pascal Pappus - AD(CE) We are already familiar with the areas of plane figures like square, rectangle, triangle, circle etc. These figures are called -dimensional shapes as they can be drawn in a plane. But most of the objects which we come across in our daily life cannot be represented in a plane.
For example, tubes, water tanks, bricks, ice-cream cones, football etc. These objects are called solid shapes or -dimensional shapes. We often see solids like cube, cuboid, prism and pyramid. For three dimensional objects measurements like surface area and volume exist.
In this chapter, we shall study about the surface area and volume of some of the standard solid shapes such as cylinder, cone, sphere, hemisphere and frustum.