Maths Olympiad Prep

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, 2021

Geometry Difficulty 8.8 Shortlist Prove it Baltic Way

There are 20212021 points on a plane, no three of which are collinear. For every 55 points there exists at least 44 among them which are concyclic. Is it necessarily true that at least 20202020 of the points are concyclic?

Solution

Answer: Yes.

Let us first prove a lemma that if 44 points AA, BB, CC, DD all lie on circle Γ\Gamma and some two points XX, YY do not lie on Γ\Gamma, then these 66 points are pairs of intersections of three circles, circle Γ\Gamma and two other circles. Indeed, according to the problem statement there are 44 points among AA, BB, CC, XX, YY which are concyclic. These 44 points must include points XX and YY because if one of them is not, then the other one must lie on Γ\Gamma. Without loss of generality, take AA, BB, XX, YY to lie on the same circle. Similarly for points AA, CC, DD, XX, YY there must be 44 points which are concyclic. Analogously, they must include points XX and YY. Point AA cannot be one of them because two circles cannot have more than two common points. Therefore, points CC, DD, XX, YY are concyclic which proves the lemma.

Let us first solve the problem for the case for which there exist 55 points which lie on one circle Γ\Gamma. Label these points AA, BB, CC, DD, EE. Let us assume that there exists two points which do not lie on Γ\Gamma, label them XX and YY. According to the previously proven lemma, points AA, BB, CC, DD, XX, YY must be the pairwise intersections of 33 circles. Without loss of generality, let the intersections of Γ\Gamma with one of the other circles be AA and BB and with the other circle CC and DD. Similarly, AA, BB, CC, EE, XX, YY must be the pairwise intersections of three circles one of which is Γ\Gamma. This is not possible as none of the points AA, BB, CC lies on the circumcircle of triangle EXYEXY. This contradiction shows that at most 11 point can lie outside circle Γ\Gamma, i.e. at least 20202020 points lie on circle Γ\Gamma.

It remains to look at the case for which no 55 points lie on the same circle. Let AA, BB, CC, DD, EE be arbitrary 55 points. Without loss of generality, let AA, BB, CC, DD be concyclic and EE a point not on this circle. According to the lemma, for every other point FF and points AA, BB, CC, DD, EE, the 66 points are the intersections of circle Γ\Gamma and some two other circles. But in total, there are 33 such points because one of the two circles must go through EE and some 22 points out of AA, BB, CC, DD, while the other circle must go through point EE and the other two points out of AA, BB, CC, DD. There are only three partitions of AA, BB, CC, DD into two sets. There is a contradiction, as there are 2021>5+32021 > 5 + 3 points in total. \square

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