Questions and Answers

One of the assignments for today's math class was to find a algorithm that can be used to solve the area of any polygon. We talked about two different methods that have been found to work. They are Pick's Theorem and the Chop Strategy. I think that I found another one but I'm not completely sure if it will work in all cases.
I start out by listing all the coordinates in order and listing the first one again at the bottom so it completely closes off the polygon. Then I multiplied all the diagonal numbers slanting down and to the right and all the diagonals slanting down and to the left. I added both of these columns and subtracted the smaller one from the larger one and divided it by two.
The first example looked like this.
0 4
8 2 3 0
12 4 4 8
16 4 0 0
0 2 2 8
0 0 0 0
0 0 4 0
= =
36 16

36-16=20
20/2= 10
The area of the first polygon on the sheet is 10...