goat grazing problem

English

Noun

goat grazing problem (plural goat grazing problems)

1. The problem: given a field of radius 1, and a goat tied to a point on the edge of said field; how long a rope should the goat be tied to, so that the goat has access to exactly half of the field? Equivalently: given a unit circle C and a point P on the rim of C, what is the value of r such that exactly half of the area within C, is within distance r of point P?
2. The same problem generalized to any number of dimensions: given a unit n-sphere (n-dimensional hypersphere) S, and a point P on the edge of S, what is r such that exactly one-half of the space (content) within S, is within distance r of P?

Synonyms

• goat problem