Let and be two unequal regular -gons and and two points inside and , respectively. Suppose are the distances from to the vertices of and are the distances from to the vertices of . Is it possible for to be a permutation of ?
Solution
Suppose that , and that 's are a permutation of 's. Let and be the centers of and , respectively. Without loss of generality it can be assumed that is inside or on the perimeter of triangle and ; is inside or on the perimeter of and . Using the following lemma 's and 's can be sorted in ascending order.
Lemma. In a situation as described above, if is odd, then
and if is even, then
Proof. The assertion can be easily proved by looking at the position of with respect to the perpendicular bisector of and (which is ), then the perpendicular bisector of and , then the perpendicular bisector of and and so on.
It can be assumed that similar inequalities hold for 's. So the problem statement is equivalent to,
Assume that is greater than . For each , (, )
Hence
which is a contradiction. This shows that and are equal.