Let be a circle in the plane and be a point on . Two brothers, Mario and Luigi, drive around the circle with their go-karts. They both start at at the same time, they both drive for exactly 6 minutes at constant speed counterclockwise around the track. During these 6 minutes, Luigi makes exactly one lap around while Mario, who is three times as fast, accomplishes three laps.
While Mario and Luigi drive their go-karts, Princess Daisy positions herself such that she is always exactly in the middle of the two brothers. When she reaches a point she has already visited, she marks it with a banana.
How many points in the plane, apart from , are marked with a banana after the race?
, 2021
Solution
Without loss of generality, we assume that is the unit circle and . Three points are marked with bananas:
(i) After 45 seconds, Luigi has passed through an arc with a subtended angle of and is at the point , whereas Mario has passed through an arc with a subtended angle of and is at the point . Therefore Daisy is at the point after 45 seconds. After 135 seconds, Mario and Luigi's positions are exactly the other way round, so the princess is again at the point and puts a banana there.
(ii) Similarly, after 225 seconds and after 315 seconds, Princess Daisy is at the point and puts a banana there.
(iii) After 90 seconds, Luigi is at and Mario at , so that Daisy is at the origin of the plane. After 270 seconds, Mario and Luigi's positions are exactly the other way round, hence Princess Daisy drops a banana at the point .
We claim that no other point in the plane, apart from these three points and , is marked with a banana. Let and be two different times when Daisy is at the same place. For we write Luigi's position at time as a complex number with . At this time, Mario is located at and Daisy at .
According to our assumption we have or, equivalently, . We have , so that we must have .
We proceed with an observation of the structure of as a set of complex numbers. Suppose that . Then if and only if . For a proof of the observation note that is a real number for every with norm . So it lies on the unit circle if and only if it is equal to 1, in which case the real part of is equal to 0, or it is equal to , in which case the real part of is equal to . We apply the observation to the number , which satisfies the premise since . Therefore, one of the following cases must occur.
(i) We have , that is, . Without loss of generality we may assume . It follows that , so that or . In the former case , which matches case (1) above. In the latter case , which matches case (2) above.
(ii) We have , that is, . It follows that , so that or . This matches case (3) above.