Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 6.5 National Olympiad Prove it Serbia

Problem:

A triangle ABCABC is given. Let points DD and EE on line ABAB be such that DABED-A-B-E, AD=ACAD = AC and BE=BCBE = BC. The internal angle bisectors at vertices AA and BB meet the opposite sides at points PP and QQ, respectively, and the circumscribed circle of triangle ABCABC at points MM and NN, respectively. The line joining point AA with the center of the circle circumscribed about triangle BMEBME and the line joining point BB with the center of the circle circumscribed about triangle ANDAND meet at point XX, XCX \neq C. Prove that CXPQCX \perp PQ. (Dušan Đukić)

Solution

Solution:

Let us denote by UU the center of the circumscribed circle of BME\triangle BME. Let us apply inversion with center AA and square of radius ABACAB \cdot AC. Points BB and CC map to points BB' and CC' symmetric to points CC and BB with respect to APAP, points PP and MM map to each other, and EE maps to a point EE' symmetric to QQ with respect to APAP. Therefore, the line AUAU coincides with the line joining AA with the center of the circle BPEB'PE' (of course, the centers do not map to each other!). We see that this line is symmetric to

Figure 1

the line AZAZ with respect to the bisector of angle AA, where ZZ is the center of the circle circumscribed about CPQ\triangle CPQ.

Analogously we obtain that the line BZBZ is symmetric to the line joining BB with the center VV of the circle ANDAND with respect to the bisector of angle BB. By Ceva's theorem in trigonometric form (or by the statement about isogonally conjugate points), the lines symmetric to the lines AU,BV,CXAU, BV, CX with respect to the bisectors of angles A,B,CA, B, C respectively also meet at one point, which means that the line CZCZ is symmetric to CXCX with respect to the bisector of angle CC. But ZZ is the center of the circle CPQCPQ, from which it follows that the line CXCX contains the altitude of triangle CPQCPQ, and that is what we wanted to prove.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from sr; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.