Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 7.6 National Olympiad, round 2 Prove it Baltic Way

Let OO be the circumcenter of triangle ABCABC. Let DD, EE and FF be the reflection of OO over lines BCBC, CACA and ABAB, respectively. Show that lines ADAD, BEBE and CFCF are concurrent.

Solution

Refer to figure 12.

As OO is the circumcenter of ABC\triangle ABC it follows that line segments OBOB and OCOC are concurrent. As DD is the reflection of OO across BCBC it follows that segments OBOB and DBDB are concurrent and segments OCOC and DCDC are concurrent. It follows that OBDCOBDC is a rhombus and therefore also a parallelogram. Similarly OCEAOCEA is also a parallelogram.

As lines BDBD and OCOC are parallel and lines OCOC and AEAE are parallel it follows from the transitivity of parallelism that lines BDBD and AEAE are parallel.

As lines OBOB and CDCD are parallel and lines OAOA and CECE are parallel it follows from Desargues's theorem (the Euclidean plane is a translation plane) that lines ABAB and EDED are parallel. We have hence shown that ABDEABDE is a parallelogram. Similarly it can be shown that AFDCAFDC is also a parallelogram.

Let PP be the intersection point of lines ADAD and BEBE. As ABDEABDE is a parallelogram it follows that PP is the midpoint of segment ADAD. As PP is the midpoint of segment ADAD and AFDCAFDC is a parallelogram it follows that line DFDF passes through PP. We have therefore demonstrated that PP is a common point on ADAD, BEBE and CFCF, that is lines ADAD, BEBE and CFCF are concurrent. \square

Figure 1

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