In a gear train with two gears, the gear ratio is defined as follows
where
is the angular velocity of the input gear while
is the angular velocity of the output gear.
This can be rewritten as a function of the number of teeth of the gears. In fact, the angular velocity of a gear is inversely proportional to the radius r of the gear:
But the radius is proportional to the number of teeth N of the gear. Therefore we can rewrite the gear ratio also as