Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /11 of 65

Geometry Difficulty 5.0 AIME, harder Prove it Romania

Let ABCABC be an acute triangle with AB<ACAB < AC, let GG be its centroid and DD the foot of the altitude from AA. The line DGDG meets the small arc BCBC of the circumcircle of triangle ABCABC at point EE. Prove that the line ABAB is tangent to the circumcircle of triangle BDEBDE.

Solution

Let FF be the point in which the parallel through AA to BCBC intersects again the circumcircle of triangle ABCABC. We prove that the points DD, GG and FF are collinear. AFCBAFCB is a cyclic trapezoid, hence a cyclic one. If TT is the orthogonal projection of point FF onto BCBC, then AFTDAFTD is a rectangle. It is easy to prove that triangles ABDABD and FCTFCT are equal; it follows that BD=CTBD = CT, i.e. MM is the midpoint of the line segment DTDT. It follows that DMFA=DMDT=12=GMGA\frac{DM}{FA} = \frac{DM}{DT} = \frac{1}{2} = \frac{GM}{GA} and, since GMD=GAF\angle GMD = \angle GAF, triangles GMDGMD and GAFGAF are similar. We deduce that DGM=FGA\angle DGM = \angle FGA, i.e. points DD, GG, FF are collinear.

Then BED=BEF=BCF=ABC=ABD\angle BED = \angle BEF = \angle BCF = \angle ABC = \angle ABD, which shows that the line ABAB is tangent to the circumcircle of triangle BDEBDE.

Figure 1

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.