dextercioby said:
I'm just waiting to see what trick you pull to convert the square [0,1]*[0,1] in itself by a change of variable...
Could you come up with a drawing...?
Daniel.
Right. So here is
The Story of Polar Coordinates and The Unit Square!
The closed unit square is defined as the subset of R^2 [0,1]x[0,1]. As the boundary of the closed square has 2-dimensional measure 0, we will refer to both the closed and open unit squares as simply the unit square. We will assume that Cartesian coordinates are well-known. Polar coordinates are related to Cartesian coordinates (x,y) by the transformation T(x,y) = (\sqrt{x^2+y^2}, arctan(y/x)) = (r, t) wherever the transformation is well-defined and the continuous extension elsewhere.
Note that the lines that define the unit square in Cartesian coordinates are x=1, x=0 and y=1, y=0. We want to split the unit square along its diagonal thusly:
Unit square
because of the way polar coordinates vary. The diagonal represents a fundamental break in the behavior of whatever overlying function defines the upper bounds of the unit square, so unless the equations tell us otherwise, we will assume we need a piecewise cover broken at the diagonal. In Cartesian coordinates, our regions (triangles) are then easily translated.
We transform the lower triangle first. The line x=1 is the set of points {(1, y)} which transforms to the set of points {(\sqrt{1+y^2}, arctan(y))} in (r,t) coordinates. Thus y = tan(t) and r = \sqrt{1 + tan^2\theta} = sec(t) is the equation of the line represented in Cartesian coordinates by x=1. Thus the lower triangle in the diagram is bounded by the polar equations r=0 to r=sec(t) where t varies from 0 to pi/4. In order to see this, work backwards from the bounds and see whether you end up with the triangle pictured.
The line y=1 is similarly r=csc(t). The further bounds for the upper triangle are trivial and are already in the thread. Of course, I didn't do all this formal stuff; I just noticed the geometry with respect to sweeping r and related it to polar coordinates. You can easily graph the functions r=csc(t), r=sec(t), t=0, and t=pi/2 to see the unit square they bound.