Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 5.9 AIME, harder Prove it Ireland

Let AEAE be a diameter of the circumcircle of triangle ABCABC. Join EE to the orthocentre, HH, of ABC\triangle ABC and extend EHEH to meet the circle again at DD. Prove that the nine point circle of ABC\triangle ABC passes through the midpoint of HDHD.

Solution

Let FF be the midpoint of DHDH, KK be the midpoint of AHAH, LL on BCBC the foot of the altitude from AA, and let MM be the intersection point of BCBC and DEDE.

Figure 1

Because AEAE is a diameter of the circumcircle, ACE=ABE=90\angle ACE = \angle ABE = 90^\circ, so CECE is perpendicular to ACAC and BEBE is perpendicular to ABAB. Because BHBH is on the altitude which is perpendicular to ACAC, we get BHCEBH \parallel CE. Similarly, CHCH is perpendicular to ABAB and so CHBECH \parallel BE. This shows that CHBECHBE is a parallelogram and MM is the intersection point of its diagonals. Hence MM is the midpoint of BCBC and thus is on the nine point circle.

Because AEAE is a diameter of the circle, ADE=90\angle ADE = 90^\circ. As F,KF, K are the midpoints of DHDH and AHAH, respectively, we obtain KFM=90\angle KFM = 90^\circ. Because KLM=90\angle KLM = 90^\circ as well, the quadrilateral KFLMKFLM is cyclic.

As K,LK, L and MM are on the nine point circle, FF is on that circle as well.

Figure 1

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