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To me the intuitive explanation is that if they were gears, with shafts fixed in a block, the small wheel would turn 3 times per turn of the big wheel, but in the given scenario the small gear also has to go around the big one, hence the R/r+1 solution.



Yeah. I think that’s the intuition I have about this too. It rotates once by virtue of going around, and three times by virtue of the size of the big circle.

If you imagine a very tiny circle it’d still rotate a full time.


Yes, but that line of thought doesn't really help when the small disk is rolling around the inside of the large disk, not the outside.




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