A polygon is a plane figure that is bounded by a finite chain of straight line segments closing in a loop to form a closed polygonal chain or circuit. These segments are called its edges or sides, and the points where two edges meet are the polygon's vertices or corners. The interior of the polygon is sometimes called its body. An -gon is a polygon with sides; for example, a triangle is a 3-gon. A polygon is a 2-dimensional example of the more general polytope in any number of dimensions.
There are many ways to find the area of a polygon.
Find the area of a regular hexagon of side length .
congruent equilateral triangles. The area of an equilateral triangle is where is the side length.A regular hexagon is composed of
So the area of one equilateral triangle is .
It follows that the area of the hexagon is
Find the area of an irregular decagon having consecutive vertices as
We can use the formula
where is half the determinant of the matrix.
We then have
Note that the area of a convex polygon is defined to be positive if the points are arranged in counterclockwise order, and negative if they are in clockwise order (Beyer 1987).