In hexagon , which is nonconvex but not self-intersecting, no pair of opposite sides are parallel. The internal angles satisfy , , and . Furthermore , , and . Prove that diagonals , , and are concurrent.
Solution
We proceed in three steps.
Step 1: We first give a recipe for constructing hexagons of this type. Let be a triangle, with all angles less than . Let be the reflection of across ; let be the reflection of across ; let be the reflection of across . Then, we have and the other analogous angle equalities. Also, we have and the other analogous side equalities. Thus, the hexagon satisfies the equations in the problem statement. The diagonals , , are simply the altitudes of the triangle , so they are concurrent at the orthocenter.
Step 2: For a hexagon meeting the conditions of the problem statement, let , , and be the measures of angles , , and . We claim that these are sufficient to determine up to scaling.
Let , , . Our goal is to show that these lengths are determined up to scale by the given angles. Let , and be unit vectors in the directions of the edges from to , to , to , to , to , and to , respectively. Then, we have the vector identity
Notice now that
so . Also, the fact that opposite sides are not parallel implies that , so ; likewise .
Assuming without loss of generality that the vertices of are labeled in counterclockwise order and making liberal use of the identity , we may compute the respective orientations of vectors , , , , and , measured counterclockwise relative to modulo , to be:
Now, whenever two unit vectors point in directions and which do not differ by , their sum is a nonzero vector either pointing in direction or direction . It follows that the vectors , and are all nonzero and point in the following directions modulo :
Recalling that and , we see that none of the pairwise differences between , and are multiples of . Thus, , and are nonzero vectors, no two of which are collinear. Consequently, condition (1) determines the coefficients uniquely up to scale, as required.
Step 3: It suffices to show that the only hexagons meeting the conditions of the problem statement are the ones constructed in Step 1. Construct a hexagon by taking to be a triangle with angles , and and reflecting each vertex across the opposite site as in Step 1. Then, satisfies the conditions of the problem statement and has , and , so by Step 2 it is similar to , completing the proof.