Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /277 of 377

Geometry Difficulty 5.4 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:
Let PP be a polyhedron where every face is a regular polygon, and every edge has length 11. Each vertex of PP is incident to two regular hexagons and one square. Choose a vertex VV of the polyhedron. Find the volume of the set of all points contained in PP that are closer to VV than to any other vertex.

Solution

Solution:
Answer: 23\frac{\sqrt{2}}{3}

Observe that PP is a truncated octahedron, formed by cutting off the corners from a regular octahedron with edge length 33. So, to compute the value of PP, we can find the volume of the octahedron, and then subtract off the volume of truncated corners.

Given a square pyramid where each triangular face is an equilateral triangle, and whose side length is ss, the height of the pyramid is 22s\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2} s, and thus the volume is 13s222s=26s3\frac{1}{3} \cdot s^{2} \cdot \frac{\sqrt{2}}{2} s = \frac{\sqrt{2}}{6} s^{3}.

The side length of the octahedron is 33, and noting that the octahedron is made up of two square pyramids, its volume must be 22(3)36=922 \cdot \frac{\sqrt{2}(3)^{3}}{6} = 9 \sqrt{2}.

The six "corners" that we remove are all square pyramids, each with volume 26\frac{\sqrt{2}}{6}, and so the resulting polyhedron PP has volume 92626=829 \sqrt{2} - 6 \cdot \frac{\sqrt{2}}{6} = 8 \sqrt{2}.

Finally, to find the volume of all points closer to one particular vertex than any other vertex, note that due to symmetry, every point in PP (except for a set with zero volume), is closest to one of the 2424 vertices. Due to symmetry, it doesn't matter which VV is picked, so we can just divide the volume of PP by 2424 to obtain the answer 23\frac{\sqrt{2}}{3}.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

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