Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 5.2 AIME, harder Prove it Taiwan

Let quadrilateral ABCDABCD have an inscribed circle with center II. Let the diagonals ACAC, BDBD intersect at point EE.
If the midpoints of the three segments ADAD, BCBC, EIEI are collinear, prove that AB=CDAB = CD.

Solution

Let ABAB and CDCD intersect at point FF, and let the midpoints of segments EFEF, ADAD, BCBC be XX, YY, ZZ respectively.
By Gauss's theorem, the three points XX, YY, ZZ are collinear (the Newton line). The line originally containing XX, YY, ZZ passes through point FF; applying a scaling by factor 22 centered at point EE will make this line pass through point II. Therefore YZFIYZ \parallel FI.
Let the midpoints of ACAC, BDBD be UU, VV respectively. Since FIFI is the angle bisector of DFA\angle DFA, YZYZ is also the angle bisector of UYV\angle UYV. But YZYZ bisects segment UVUV (UYVZUYVZ is a parallelogram), so UYVZUYVZ is a rhombus, which gives YU=YVYU = YV. Therefore AB=2YU=2YV=CDAB = 2YU = 2YV = CD.

Figure 1

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from zh; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.