Problem:
Let be a point interior to a triangle . The lines , and intersect the sides of at , and respectively. Setting
prove that .

Problem:
Let be a point interior to a triangle . The lines , and intersect the sides of at , and respectively. Setting
prove that .

Solution:
One easily checks that, for any nonzero real numbers chosen arbitrarily, setting , and , the relation to be proved becomes an algebraic identity.
To find proceed as follows: let and be the intersections of the line through parallel to with the segments and respectively. Let and be the intersections of with the lines through parallel to the segments and respectively, and set , , .
The triangles and are similar, since they have their sides pairwise parallel, and moreover the relations , and hold, since and are parallelograms.
Applying Thales's theorem to the parallels and , it follows that , and similarly it follows that , by applying the same theorem to the parallels and . Again by Thales's theorem, we have , whence , using the similarity between and . Hence, , and this concludes the proof.