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Geometry Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Find the answer United States

A disphenoid is a tetrahedron whose triangular faces are congruent to one another. What is the least total surface area of a disphenoid whose faces are scalene triangles with integer side lengths?

Pick one

Solution

Answer (D): First note that adjacent faces must be rotations of one another to create a disphenoid (see the figure below). If they were instead mirrored, then the other two faces would be isosceles (and be neither scalene nor congruent to the others, as required).

Figure 1

Next, to determine what triangles could form a disphenoid, let the positive integer side lengths be aa, bb, and cc, with a<b<ca < b < c. Consider two faces of the tetrahedron that have their sides of length cc in common. That common edge can be thought of as a “hinge” between two faces. If those two faces were laid flat, they would form a parallelogram with one diagonal of length cc. When folded over the hinge, the other diagonal of the parallelogram becomes two sides of a triangle whose third side is the last edge of the tetrahedron. (Note that this last edge must have length cc to create the disphenoid.) If the sides of length aa and bb formed a right angle, then the parallelogram would be a rectangle, and the other diagonal would also have length cc. A tetrahedron formed by folding the triangles over the hinge would have its last edge shorter than cc, making it not a disphenoid. If instead the sides of length aa and bb formed an obtuse angle, the other diagonal would be shorter than cc, and folding would make the last edge shorter yet (and again not a disphenoid). Thus the faces must be acute to form a disphenoid.

To minimize the surface area, aa, bb, and cc must be the least distinct integers that form an acute triangle. Note that 2, 3, and 4 form an obtuse triangle (because 22+32<422^2 + 3^2 < 4^2); and 3, 4, and 5 form a right triangle. However, 42+52=41>36=624^2 + 5^2 = 41 > 36 = 6^2, so 4, 5, and 6 form an acute triangle with the least area. The area of one face can be computed using Heron's Formula. The triangle's semiperimeter is 4+5+62=152\frac{4+5+6}{2} = \frac{15}{2}, and the disphenoid's total surface area is

4152(1524)(1525)(1526)=411615(158)(1510)(1512)=4415753=157. \begin{aligned} 4 \cdot \sqrt{\frac{15}{2} \left(\frac{15}{2} - 4\right) \left(\frac{15}{2} - 5\right) \left(\frac{15}{2} - 6\right)} &= 4 \cdot \sqrt{\frac{1}{16} \cdot 15 \cdot (15-8) \cdot (15-10) \cdot (15-12)} \\ &= \frac{4}{4} \cdot \sqrt{15 \cdot 7 \cdot 5 \cdot 3} = 15\sqrt{7}. \end{aligned}

Another way to find the area of a face is to use the formula 12absinγ\frac{1}{2}ab \sin \gamma. By the Law of Cosines,

cosγ=a2+b2c22ab=42+5262245=18. \cos \gamma = \frac{a^2 + b^2 - c^2}{2ab} = \frac{4^2 + 5^2 - 6^2}{2 \cdot 4 \cdot 5} = \frac{1}{8}.

Then

sinγ=1164=378. \sin \gamma = \sqrt{1 - \frac{1}{64}} = \frac{3\sqrt{7}}{8}.

Therefore the area of one face is

1245378=1574, \frac{1}{2} \cdot 4 \cdot 5 \cdot \frac{3\sqrt{7}}{8} = \frac{15\sqrt{7}}{4},

and the total surface area is 15715\sqrt{7}.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.