Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Prove it New Zealand

Problem:

An equilateral triangle is partitioned into smaller equilateral triangular pieces. Prove that two of the pieces are the same size.

Solution

Solution:

For the purpose of this proof, we will consider a vertex to be any point which is a corner of at least one of the triangular pieces. Define an edge to be any line segment between two vertices, which is part of a side of a triangular piece but does not pass through any other vertex. Note that each vertex must be one of the following types:
- Type AA: incident with only 2 edges at 6060^{\circ}.
- Type BB: incident with exactly 4 edges at angles 60,60,60,18060^{\circ}, 60^{\circ}, 60^{\circ}, 180^{\circ}.
- Type CC: incident with exactly 6 edges forming six 6060^{\circ} angles.

There can be no other types of vertex, because all the angles must be 6060^{\circ} or 180180^{\circ} (or 300300^{\circ} in the corners of the original large triangle). We will now colour each edge-end either green or blue, as shown in the diagram (the green edge-ends are also a bit thicker).

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3

An edge-end is coloured green if it touches a Type BB vertex along the 180180^{\circ} angle, otherwise it is coloured blue. Now observe that there must be exactly 3 vertices of type AA (the three corners of the original large triangle before it was partitioned). If there are xx vertices of type BB and yy vertices of type CC then this makes a total of
(6+2x+6y)(6 + 2x + 6y)
blue ends, but only (2x)(2x) green ends.

Note also that the 6 edges with an endpoint at a type AA vertex must all have their other end being green. There are more blue edge-ends than green edge-ends, so it can't be the case that every blue edge-end is connected to a green edge-end. There must therefore be an edge such that both of its ends are blue. Since neither endpoint of such an edge is a type AA vertex, we can conclude that all four of the angles at the endpoints of this double blue-ended edge must be 6060^{\circ}.

Figure 4

Therefore this edge is a shared side of two triangular pieces. These two triangular pieces must therefore be the same size. \square

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