We are given an acute triangle . Point lies in the halfplane containing and satisfies and . Similarly, lies in the halfplane containing and satisfies and . Let be the reflection of in the midpoint of arc (containing point ). Prove that points are concyclic. (Patrik Bak, Slovakia)
, 2025
Solutions — 3
Solution 1
Denote and . The conditions translate as and . Denote by the intersection point of and . Clearly , and so is the angle bisector of . Similarly, is the angle bisector of .
Let be the midpoints of , respectively. It is enough to show that the circle through also passes through the midpoint of arc . Consider the circumcircle of and denote its second intersection points with by , respectively.

First, we will show that . Notice that due being right, we have that is the circumcenter of , and so . Then we get , and also . Together with , we have that triangles and are congruent, and so . Similarly, we can show , and so as we wanted.
We will now show that the circle through passes through the midpoint of arc . Denote by the second intersection of this circle with the circle .
Clearly and , and also , so triangle and are congruent, giving , which is enough.
Solution 2
Similarly to the previous solution, we consider homothety with center and coefficient to obtain points and prove that are isosceles triangles. Moreover, by angle chasing we can get and . Let us notice that the sum of these angles . We may view these three isosceles triangles as three rotations (for example, triangle corresponds to the rotation around by angle and sends point to point ). We will call them green, blue, and red.
Because the sum of the three angles is , the composition of these three rotations is a translation. Moreover, if we follow the image of we notice that green rotation maps it to , then blue maps it to , and finally red maps it back to . Hence, the translation is actually an identity. Let be the image of under the blue rotation. Then is similar to . And because is the center of the green rotation, the composition of blue and red rotations has to map back to . Hence, has to be similar to . And so . Thus, is cyclic and we are done.
Solution 3
[sketch] Let be as in the original solution. Denote the midpoint of arc . Moreover, let the line meet the lines and at and , respectively. Since is the external angle bisector, we get . Therefore, , so the triangle is isosceles. Since is a diameter of the circumcircle of , , thus is the midpoint .
We can calculate . Similarly . This gives us that the triangles and are spirally similar. From this spiral similarity we get that also is similar to them. So, .
We can calculate , hence are concyclic. Homothety with center and coefficient 2 maps this circle to the desired circle.
