Geometry of the Prytz planimeter (Q1290356)

In 1875 Holger Prytz invented a simple device to measure the area of a planar region. This planimeter is governed by a nonholonomic constraint. In the paper under review many historical facts about the device are recalled including the analysis of the device by Prytz himself and F. W. Hill, a contemporary of Prytz. The author discusses especially the behaviour of the device when the planimeter is tracing large areas compared to its size and he shows that the result is most accurate when the area is small compared to the size of the planimeter. Then, he deals with a surprising relation of the behaviour of the device with the isoperimetric inequality and gives an interpretation of the motion of the planimeter as a parallel translation for a connection on a principal \(SU(1,1)\)-bundle and the induced connection on an induced associated circle bundle. It is shown that the transformations induced by the motion of the planimeter form the group of Möbius-transformations that preserve \(S^1\) and its orientation. The last section deals with the special motion of the tracer along the sides of a parallelogram.