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A white cross is placed symmetrically in a red disc with the central square of side length sqrt 2 and the arms of the cross of length 1 unit. What is the area of the disc still showing?
Problem
Image

A white cross is placed in a red disc as shown and the resulting
figure is symmetrical.
What is the area of the disc still showing?
Student Solutions
Congratulations for your solutions to Hyeyoun Chung, age 17,
St Paul's Girls' School, London; Royce Ferguson; Ang Zhi Ping, age
16; Yatir Halevi, age 17, Maccabim and Reut High-School, Israel;
and Joe Nielson, Rowan Maclennon-Ryde and Elizabeth Brewster from
Madras College, St Andrew's, Scotland.
The radius of the circle OA can be found by using the right
triangle formed by $AB = (1 + (\sqrt 2)/2)$ and $BO = (\sqrt
2)/2)$. Using Pythagoras' theorem, the radius is found to be $OA =
\sqrt(2 +\sqrt 2)$ units and the area of the circle to be $\pi (2 +
\sqrt 2)$.
Now, connect the centre of the circle to the 8 points on it's
circumference where the white meets red. This divides the white
into circular sectors and quadrilaterals.
Image

Using the cosine rule to find $\angle AOD$ we have $AC=CD=1$ and so $AD = \sqrt 2$ and hence
Hence $\angle AOD = 45$ degrees.
The area of the triangle $AOD$ is
To find the area of the minor segment $AD$ we subtract the area of triangle $AOD$ from the area of sector $AOD$ which gives
To get the total red shaded area we now add the area of triangle $ACD$ and multiply by $4$ which gives: