Let be a scalene triangle and let and be two distinct points in its interior. Suppose that the angle bisectors of , , and are the altitudes of triangle . Prove that the midpoint of lies on the Euler line of .
Solutions — 3
Solution 1
Let be the orthocenter of , and construct using the following claim.
Claim — There is a point for which
Proof. After inversion at , this is equivalent to the fact that 's image has an isogonal conjugate in 's image.
Now, let , , and be the reflections of over , , and respectively. Additionally, let be the image of under inversion about .

Claim — .
Proof. Since
and cyclic variants, triangles and are similar. Additionally,
and cyclic variants, so summing in pairs gives and cyclic variants; this implies the similarity.
Claim — lies on the Euler line of triangle .
Proof. Let be the circumcenter of so that . Then , so lies on . By the similarity, must lie on the Euler line of .
To finish the problem, let be the centroid of and be the centroid of . Then with signed areas,
where the last line follows from the last claim. Therefore bisects , as desired.
Remark. This solution characterizes the set of all points for which such a point exists. It is the image of the Euler line under the mapping described in the first claim.
Solution 2
Let be the unit circle in the complex plane, and let , , such that . Let and , and and be the circumcenter and orthocenter of respectively.
The first step is to translate the given geometric conditions into a single usable equation:
Claim — We have the equation
Proof. The condition that the altitude bisects is equivalent to
Writing the symmetric conditions that and bisect and gives three equations:
Now, sum times the first equation, times the second equation, and times the third equation. On the left side, the coefficients of and are 0. Additionally, the coefficient of 1 (the parenthesized terms on the left sides of each equation) sum to 0, since
This gives (1) as desired.
We can then factor (1):
Claim — The left-hand side of (1) factors as
while the right-hand side factors as
Proof. This can of course be verified by direct expansion, but here is a slightly more economic indirect proof.
Consider the cyclic sum on the left as a polynomial in , , and . If , then it simplifies as , so divides this polynomial. Similarly, and divide it, so it can be written as for some symmetric quadratic polynomial , and thus it is some linear combination of and . When , the whole expression is , so , which implies that .
Similarly, consider the cyclic sum on the right as a polynomial in , , and . If , then it simplifies as , so divides this polynomial. Similarly, and divide it, so it can be written as where is a symmetric linear polynomial; hence, it is a scalar multiple of . When , the whole expression is , so , which implies that .
Since , , and are distinct, we may divide by to obtain
This implies that is real, so the midpoint of lies on line .
Solution 3
We use complex numbers as in the previous solution. The angle conditions imply that , , and are real numbers. Take a linear combination of these with real coefficients , , and to be determined; after expansion, we obtain
which is a real number. To get something about the midpoint of , the coefficient should be zero, which motivates the following lemma.
Lemma
There exist real , , for which
Proof. Since is a 2-dimensional vector space over , there exist real , , such that and the first condition holds. Suppose for the sake of contradiction that . Then
We can easily check that is impossible, therefore is real. This means or . By symmetry, the same is true of and . This is impossible because is scalene.
With the choice of , , as in the lemma, there exist complex numbers and , depending only on , , and , such that and is real. Therefore the midpoint of , which corresponds to , lies on a fixed line. It remains to show that this line is the Euler line. First, choose to be the orthocenter to show that the orthocenter lies on the line. Secondly, choose and to be the foci of the Steiner circumellipse to show that the centroid lies on the line. (By some ellipse properties, the external angle bisector of is the tangent to the circumellipse at , which is the line through parallel to . Therefore these points are valid.) Therefore the fixed line of the midpoint is the Euler line.
Remark. This solution does not require fixing the origin of the complex plane or setting to be the unit circle.