One thing that helped me intuit the “sidereal” result (4) was to consider what happens as the radius of circle B approaches 0. At least in my mind, it seems pretty clear that A has to undergo at least one rotation.
That said, I am unsure that I would have caught this as a test-taker. Derek’s videos always have some “trick”, putting me on guard, but in a testing scenario I would have seen the answer for 3 with no answer for 4, marked it down, and moved on quickly.
themusicman@lemmy.world 11 months ago
For anyone still struggling with the intuition:
How many times does a circle rotate if you roll it around a tiny dot? 1
How many times does it rotate if you roll it around another circle the same size? Gotta be more than the dot, right?