Consider a right circular cylinder with radius and altitude
. Find the right circular cylinder of largest lateral surface area that can be inscribed in this cone.
The lateral surface area of the cylinder is given by , where
is the radius of the cylinder and
is the height of the cylinder. From the diagram we find a formula for
in terms of the constants
and
, and the radius of the cylinder
,
Thus, letting denote the lateral surface area we have
Taking the derivative of this with respect to and setting it equal to zero,
Since
Therefore, this critical point is a maximum.
Then plugging this back into our expression for we have