Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / IRL ABooklet /52 of 191

IRL ABooklet

Geometry Difficulty 5.4 AIME, harder Prove it Ireland

The four vertices of quadrilateral ABCDABCD lie on the circle with diameter ABAB. The diagonals of ABCDABCD intersect at EE, and the lines ADAD and BCBC intersect at FF. Line FEFE meets ABAB at KK and line DKDK meets the circle again at LL. Prove that CLCL is perpendicular to ABAB.

Solutions — 3

Solution 1

Figure 1
Note that ∠ADB=90∘=∠ACB\angle ADB = 90^\circ = \angle ACB (angles in a semicircle). It follows that EE is the orthocentre of △FAB\triangle FAB. Therefore FKFK is perpendicular to ABAB. It follows that ADEKADEK is cyclic. Therefore ∠AEK=∠ADK\angle AEK = \angle ADK. Since ∠ADK=∠ADL=∠ACL\angle ADK = \angle ADL = \angle ACL (same segment), we have ∠AEK=∠ACL\angle AEK = \angle ACL which implies that EKEK is parallel to CLCL. Since EKEK is perpendicular to ABAB, this implies that CLCL is perpendicular to ABAB.

Solution 2

Because the angles ∠ADB\angle ADB and ∠ACB\angle ACB are right angles, EE is the orthocentre of triangle ABFABF and FKFK is perpendicular to ABAB. From the right angles ∠BKF\angle BKF and ∠BDF\angle BDF we see that BFDKBFDK is cyclic, hence ∠KDB=∠KFB\angle KDB = \angle KFB. Because ABCDABCD was given to be cyclic, we have ∠LAB=∠LDB\angle LAB = \angle LDB. The right angled triangles ABCABC and FKBFKB are similar as they share an angle at BB, and so ∠KFB=∠BAC\angle KFB = \angle BAC. Together, this implies
∠LAB=∠LDB=∠KDB=∠KFB=∠BAC \angle LAB = \angle LDB = \angle KDB = \angle KFB = \angle BAC
and this means that ABAB is the angle bisector of ∠LAC\angle LAC.

Figure 2
As a consequence, the right angled triangles ALB and ACB are congruent, which shows that triangle LAC is isosceles with |AL| = |AC|. It is a well known fact about isosceles triangles, which easily follows from ASA, that the angle bisector AB is perpendicular to the opposite side CL.

Solution 3

It is known that the altitudes of a triangle are the internal angle bisectors of its orthic triangle. Armed with this knowledge we proceed as follows.
Because the angles ∠ADB\angle ADB and ∠ACB\angle ACB are right angles, EE is the orthocentre of triangle ABFABF and FKFK is perpendicular to ABAB. Hence, CDKCDK is the orthic triangle of triangle ABFABF, which implies that BDBD is the angle bisector of ∠KDC=∠LDC\angle KDC = \angle LDC.
Figure 3
Now we use the fact that an angle bisector in a triangle meets the perpendicular bisector of the opposite side on the circumcircle of that triangle. Applying this to triangle LDC we see that B is the point on the circumcircle where the angle bisector of ∠LDC\angle LDC meets the perpendicular bisector of CL, which passes through the circumcentre O of triangle LDC. Hence, BO is perpendicular to CL.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,604 problems in a working order, from Junior Challenge level to the IMO shortlist.

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