Let be a triangle with circumcenter . A circle is tangent to and at and , respectively. Let be a point on other than such that . Let be the intersection of and other than , and let be the intersection of and other than . Let be a point on such that . Prove that half of equals or .
Solution
Solution. Since is the angle between and , consider the circle and its second intersection with . Also let intersects at . Denote by . Now we first show the following two lemmas.
Lemma 1. or .
Proof. Note that is orthogonal to both and as . Therefore, if we take the inversion at and denote the image of a point by , then , are diameters of a circle that intersect with angle . Thus it is clear that
Lemma 2. .
Proof. Take the inversion at with radius . This inversion sends to a line passing through and perpendicular to , and thus it is . This shows that the inversion sends to and to . Moreover, the inversions sends to , and so is sent to the reflection of with respect to as is harmonic. Since , we have that is the perpendicular bisector of . Moreover, since are concyclic, we have that are also concyclic. As a consequence, .
To show the original statement, note that by perspectivity through , we have
where the first equality follows from the first lemma and the last equality follows from the second lemma. Thus either or , as desired.