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Problems from Ukrainian Authors

Geometry Difficulty 5.6 AIME, harder Prove it Ukraine

BEBE and CFCF are the altitudes of the acute scalene △ABC\triangle ABC, OO is its circumcenter and MM is the midpoint of the side BCBC. If the point, which is symmetric to MM with respect to OO, lies on the line EFEF, find all possible values of the ratio AMAO\frac{AM}{AO}.

Figure 1
Fig. 21

Solution

Let HH be the orthocenter of △ABC\triangle ABC, A′A' be the antipode of AA in (ABC)(ABC), SS be the point, which is symmetric to MM with respect to OO (fig. 21), and TT be the intersection of BCBC and EFEF. It's well-known that in this construction HH is the orthocenter of △AMT\triangle AMT, BHCA′BHCA' is parallelogram (then MM is the midpoint of A′HA'H) and AH=2OMAH = 2OM.

Figure 1

As SM=2OM=AHSM = 2OM = AH and AH⊥BC⊥SMAH \perp BC \perp SM, we can obtain that AHMSAHMS is parallelogram. Hence, SS is the antipode of TT in (AMT)(AMT) and ∠AMH=90∘−∠MAT=90∘−∠MST=∠STM\angle AMH = 90^\circ - \angle MAT = 90^\circ - \angle MST = \angle STM. As OM⊥BCOM \perp BC and AO⊥EFAO \perp EF, we obtain that ∠A′OM=∠STM\angle A'OM = \angle STM. So, ∠A′OM=∠AMH\angle A'OM = \angle AMH, hence △AA′M∼△AMO\triangle AA'M \sim \triangle AMO and then AA′⋅AO=AM2⇒AMAO=2AA' \cdot AO = AM^2 \Rightarrow \frac{AM}{AO} = \sqrt{2}.

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