As proved by my good friend Archimedes, in his Measurement of a Circle, the area enclosed by a circle is equal to that of a triangle whose base has the length of the circle's circumference & whose height equals the circle's radius, which comes to π multiplied by the radius squared:
Area = pi r^2. Equivalently, denoting diameter by d
Area =pi d^2/4 approx 0.7854d^2, that is, approximately 79% of the circumscribing square whose side is of length d
The circle is the plane curve enclosing the maximum area for a given arc length. This relates the circle to a problem in the calculus of variations, namely the isoperimetric inequality [of course]