Let be an isosceles triangle with . The points and are on the line (extended in both directions) such that is between and and is between and . Moreover, and are isosceles triangles. Let be a point on the line such that is not between and .
Prove that if and only if .
Solution
Because , we have and . For the first equation we used that is between and . To see this, we have to exclude that is between and (by assumption, is not between and ). If , cannot be between and , because the angle is acute. If , we have , hence is not between and .
We see now that the equation is equivalent to
which rewrites as
which simplifies to , or equivalently . Because the triangles and have a common angle at , this last equality is equivalent to these two triangles being similar with sides and in triangle corresponding to sides and in triangle . Because is isosceles, the same is then true for the triangle , hence . On the other hand, if , triangle is isosceles and because it shares an angle with at , both triangles are similar. This finishes the proof of the desired equivalence.