In the interiors of the sides , , of a given triangle , points , and , respectively, are given such that
Show that the triangles and have a common orthocenter if and only if the triangle is equilateral.
Solution
A point of the plane containing a triangle is its orthocenter if and only if, at the same time, and ; that is, and . Substituting and , an easy manipulation leads to the equivalent condition in the form of the equality of the scalar products
Our goal is thus to find out when the system (1) is satisfied together with the analogous system
expressing the fact that the point is the orthocenter of the triangle . We now express the vectors from (2) as linear combinations of the vectors from (1). By hypothesis, there exists a number , , for which
Substituting into the first equality and , we get after a small manipulation the first of the following three equalities
the other two can be derived similarly. Taking products, we get
where denotes the common value of the products from (1). Similarly,
We see that the system (2) is equivalent to the system of equalities
which, in view of the condition , is fulfilled if and only if . The last condition means that the orthocenter of the triangle coincides with its circumcenter. This happens if and only if the triangle is equilateral.