Law of sines, chords and similar triangles

Recently, I picked up my pencil and notebook and started to draw circles and triangles again. Swiftly, by drawing similar triangles circumscribed by circles, I got interested in their proportionalities, leading me to the law of sines.
For any triangle ABC, where a is the length of the side opposite to angle A, b the length of the side opposite to angle B and c the length of the side opposite to angle C, the law of sines states that:

where d is the diameter of the circle circumscribing ABC, as traced in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Arbitrary triangle ABC circumscribed in its circle with diameter d

My search in literature and web left me somewhat frustrated, for different reasons:

• one often omits to mention the diameter d, in its statement and even in its proof,
• one rarely develops this very elegant statement to closely related geometrical principles, like the intercept theorem or similarity transformations
• the historical background of the law of sines couldn't be checked easily from its original sources.

Why we should not leave out the diameter d of the circumscribed circle

The law is often stated in the reciprocal form and leaving out the diameter.

while in this case, we should really write:

We should have in mind that the sine of an angle is the length of the chord of the same angle inscribed in a circle of unit diameter, as you can teach children with spaghetti.

The law of sines can be understood as a statement relative to proportions between:
- chords traced in a circle with unit diameter,
- and similar chords traced in a circle scaled up by a factor d.

For example, we could trace a circle with unit diameter tangent at A inside the original circle, see Figure 2. With the notation used in this figure, the scale factor d can then be read out easily as different ratios: d = a/a₀ = b/b₀ = c/c₀.

Figure 2: Triangle ABC and tangent unit circle in A

This is one of the intuitions behind the law of sines. and we could view it as a natural law of similarity: "Corresponding lines in similar figures are in proportion, and corresponding angles in similar figures have the same measure."

Of course, if we want to set up a formal proof, we can deduce it from other laws :

1. The inscribed angle:

When inscribed in the same circle, all angles, subtending arcs of the same measure, are equal.

In Figure 2, BC being of the same length as DE, the angles  and are equal.

Therefore sin A = "opposite side over hypotenuse" = a/d.

Q.E.D.

This is also visually explained at "Better explained" or for those who read French "Blog de maths".

2. Central and inscribed angle, with Pythagoras:

This proof involves an additional notion: the central angle.
One can find it on other good sites:
Pat Ballew's blog
Math less travelled

3. Using the height of the triangle
This proof comes in different variations, either through expressing the area respective to the different heights (as given on wikipedia), either through expressing one height as ratios with two different sides (this is the academic proof, example here). Not my favorite one, as it doesn't give any insight in the scale factor d. If you don't need to pass exams, but doing math for fun, please forget this one!

Homothetic transformation with scale factor d

A homothety is a transformation where a geometric entity is transformed a similar version with a scale factor. In Figure 2, we represented the homothety from a circle of unit diameter towards a circle with diameter d. The inscribed lines, triangles and other polygons undergo the same scaling. And thus, we can complement the law of sines with a list of other ratios that also equal d.
In Figure 3, I draw the unit circle at an arbitrary place in space. Then joining similar points. The intersection of the lines is the homothetic center O.

Figure 3: Triangle ABC as a homothety from A₀B₀C₀ centered in O

Now, any line passing through O and intersecting with the small circle, will also intersect with the large circle at similar points (example D and D₀, C and C₀, B and B₀, etc.) The ratios of various line segments that are created if we trace pairs of parallels from these points will be the same, for example:
CD/C₀D₀ = BD/B₀D₀ = AD/A₀D₀ = OD/OD₀ = d
This is the intercept theorem.

Curiously, when searching on the web, both laws, the law of sines and the intercept theorem aren't often associated, while they are, in my opinion, stemming from the same basic principle of conservation of proportions.

I refer to two interesting posts that are related:
At Math is fun: Theorems about Similar Triangles
At Girls' Angle: Do you believe this?

Historical background

And in the history of geometry?

I've looked up sources about Apollonius of Perga, Ptolemy, Regiomontanus, Viete, Coignet (http://logica.ugent.be/albrecht/math/bosmans/R007.pdf), Simson (Elements of the conic sections), Jakob Steiner, but couldn't always find the original sources. I would be interested to have access to them.

The same for a paper by Richard Brandon Kershner. "The Law of Sines and Law of Cosines for Polygons." Mathematics Magazine, vol. 44, no. 3, 1971, pp. 150–153. www.jstor.org/stable/2688227.