Area of Rhombus Shortcut
An edge of a Math enthusiasts than the normal the people is they can create their own formula. Last year while we were reviewing for elimination round of MMC, I came across with this question, “The diagonal of a rhombus differ by 4. If its perimeter is 40, find its area”.
This problem could be easy for everyone but not for beginners, let me show how to derive a shortcut formula for this problem.
Before we do that, we need first to know some important properties of Rhombus that will help us along the way.
- Each side of a rhombus is equal
- The intersection of the diagonals of rhombus forms a right angle
We will base our derivation using the figure below
Let be a rhombus with side
and diagonals
and
. The diagonals intersect at point
.
Objective: Find a shortcut formula to solve for the area of the rhombus given a side s and the difference of the length of diagonals.
Area of Rhombus:
Rearranging
(i)
Observe in the figure that is a right triangle. By Pythagorean theorem, we have the following relations.
Consider the identity .
This can be written in
By substitution we have,
From (i) we have
By another substitution,
What about if the given is the sum of the lengths of diagonal?
Then we have to consider the following identity
Do the same derivation technique until you get the following formula.
Going back to the problem posted above, using the derived formula the answer must be 96 sq. units.