5.4.1 Introduction

In nature, various figures in different shapes can be found. There, rounded shapes are particularly evident. When it comes to partitioning a surface completely, some boundaries can be found that can be approximated as line segments. The honeycomb structures created by insects are a famous example. Technical applications are often based on figures bounded by straight line segments.
In this section we consider some special cases of polygons which can be used to describe surfaces bounded by straight line segments. To do this, we will first specify some characteristic features. Then, we will address the question of calculating the area of a polygon.