Integrating to Find Center of Mass and Moments

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The center of mass of a plane figure/object FF is, physically speaking, the center of gravity (or "balancing point") of the object. (To be completely precise, the center of gravity might differ from the center of mass if the "gravitational field is non-uniform"---but on Earth this is not something we have to worry about.)

As such, we might expect the center of mass to be a weighted average of the points in FF. More precisely, if μ(p)\mu(p) is the density at point p∈Fp\in F (note: pp is in the plane, so it has some coordinates (x,y)(x,y))---so the total mass of FF is ∬p=(x,y)∈Fμ(p)dxdy\iint_{p = (x,y)\in F} \mu(p) dx dy then the centroid (in Cartesian coordinates) is (∬p=(x,y)∈Fx⋅μ(x,y)Mdxdy,∬p=(x,y)∈Fy⋅μ(x,y)Mdxdy).(\iint_{p = (x,y)\in F} x\cdot \frac{\mu(x,y)}{M} dx dy, \iint_{p = (x,y)\in F} y\cdot \frac{\mu(x,y)}{M} dx dy). This might look scary at first, but in words, the xx-coordinate of the center of mass is just the average of the xx-coordinates of points in FF, with "heavier" points pp of larger density μ(p)\mu(p) getting more weight in the average; and the same for the yy-coordinate.

If μ(p)=1\mu(p) = 1 for all p∈Fp \in F (in this case we say FF has "uniform density"---the weight is equally distributed), then what does MM (the weighted mass) simplify too?

When FF has uniform density, MM is just the integral of 1dxdy1 dx dy over all of FF, which is just the area of FF.

Type a concept, like “slope” or “photosynthesis”.

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