Generate a random point within a circle (uniformly)

Question

I need to generate a uniformly random point within a circle of radius R.

I realize that by just picking a uniformly random angle in the interval [0 ... 2π), and uniformly random radius in the interval (0 ... R) I would end up with more points towards the center, since for two given radii, the points in the smaller radius will be closer to each other than for the points in the larger radius.

I found a blog entry on this over here but I don't understand his reasoning. I suppose it is correct, but I would really like to understand from where he gets (2/R²)×r and how he derives the final solution.

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Update: 7 years after posting this question I still hadn't received a satisfactory answer on the actual question regarding the math behind the square root algorithm. So I spent a day writing an answer myself. Link to my answer.

Answer 1

Let's approach this like Archimedes would have.

How can we generate a point uniformly in a triangle ABC, where |AB|=|BC|? Let's make this easier by extending to a parallelogram ABCD. It's easy to generate points uniformly in ABCD. We uniformly pick a random point X on AB and Y on BC and choose Z such that XBYZ is a parallelogram. To get a uniformly chosen point in the original triangle we just fold any points that appear in ADC back down to ABC along AC.

Now consider a circle. In the limit we can think of it as infinitely many isoceles triangles ABC with B at the origin and A and C on the circumference vanishingly close to each other. We can pick one of these triangles simply by picking an angle theta. So we now need to generate a distance from the center by picking a point in the sliver ABC. Again, extend to ABCD, where D is now twice the radius from the circle center.

Picking a random point in ABCD is easy using the above method. Pick a random point on AB. Uniformly pick a random point on BC. Ie. pick a pair of random numbers x and y uniformly on [0,R] giving distances from the center. Our triangle is a thin sliver so AB and BC are essentially parallel. So the point Z is simply a distance x+y from the origin. If x+y>R we fold back down.

Here's the complete algorithm for R=1. I hope you agree it's pretty simple. It uses trig, but you can give a guarantee on how long it'll take, and how many random() calls it needs, unlike rejection sampling.

t = 2*pi*random()
u = random()+random()
r = if u>1 then 2-u else u
[r*cos(t), r*sin(t)]

Here it is in Mathematica.

f[] := Block[{u, t, r},
  u = Random[] + Random[];
  t = Random[] 2 Pi;
  r = If[u > 1, 2 - u, u];
  {r Cos[t], r Sin[t]}
]

ListPlot[Table[f[], {10000}], AspectRatio -> Automatic]