First moment of an area and the centroid: We first consider an area in a plane; let us call it the X-Y plane

(see figure 1).

The first moment MX of the area about the x-axis is defined as follows. Take small area element
of area A and multiply it by its y-coordinate, i.e. its perpendicular distance from the X-axis, and
then sum over the entire area; the sum obviously goes over to an integral in the continuous limit.
Thus

Similarly the first moment MY of the area about the y-axis is defined by multiplying the
elemental area A by its x-coordinate, i.e. its perpendicular distance from the Y-axis, and
summing or integrating it over the entire area. Thus
This is shown in figure 2.

Centroid: Centroid of a bounded area is a point whose x-coordinates XC and y-coordinate YC are
defined as

where A is its total area. We now solve some examples of calculating these quantities for some
simple areas.

Example 1: We start with the simple example of the first moment and centroid of a triangle with
the base along the x-axis. Let its base BC be of length b, and let the height of the triangle be h.
(see figure 3)

To calculate the Mx, we take a strip of width dy at height y (see figure 3). Then

But by similarity of triangles . So

Thus
Let us now calculate the x-co-ordinates for the centroid. For this let the x-coordinate of A be a so
that the coordinate of point A is (a, h).

Now

For dA let us now take a vertical strip (figure 4). Notice that . We will also perform

the x-integration in two parts: one from x = 0 to x = a, and the other from x = a to x = b because
in the two regions, dependent of y on x is different so

For the region x = 0 to x = a, we can write

and for the region x = a to x = b, we have

Thus

This gives

Thus for a triangle .

Example2: As the second example, let us calculate the centroid of a semicircular disc of radius
R . It would be quite easy to solve this problem if the centre D of the circle is kept at the origin
but I want to do the problem with the disc positioned as drawn below to show you how to tackle
the problem.
The equation of OBC (the circular boundary of the disc) is

where R is the radius of the circle. The total area of the plate is . To calculate XC , we take
a vertical strip of width dx at x and calculate

With , we get

To evaluate this integral, we let so that the limits of integration are from

. Then

which gives

To calculate YC we need to calculate MX = , where dA represents as strip from x1 to x2 (see

figure 6)
From the equation of the circle we get

This gives

and therefore

Substituting y = R sin , we get

This gives
Thus the centroid of the semicircle shown is at . Notice that the y coordinate of the

centroid is less than which is easily understood because more of the area is concentrated
towards the x-axis.

We would no like to emphasize that the centroid (XC YC ) gives a point fixed in a given planar
surface and no matter in which co-ordinate system we calculate this point, it will always come
out to be the same point in the surface. Thus it is a property of a surface.