GeometryDifficulty 5.5AIME, harderProve itUnited States
Problem:
Consider the L-shaped tromino below with 3 attached unit squares. It is cut into exactly two pieces of equal area by a line segment whose endpoints lie on the perimeter of the tromino. What is the longest possible length of the line segment?
Solution
Solution:
Let the line segment have endpoints A and B. Without loss of generality, let A lie below the lines x+y=3 (as this will cause B to be above the line x+y=3) and y=x (we can reflect about y=x to get the rest of the cases):
Now, note that as A ranges from (0,0) to (1.5,0), B will range from (1,1) to (1,2) to (0,2), as indicated by the red line segments. Note that these line segments are contained in a rectangle bounded by x=0, y=0, x=1.5, and y=2, and so the longest line segment in this case has length 22+1.52=25.
As for the rest of the cases, as A=(x,0) ranges from (1.5,0) to (3,0), B will be the point (0,x3), so it suffices to maximize x2+x29 given 1.5≤x≤3. Note that the further away x2 is from 3, the larger x2+x29 gets, and so the maximum is achieved when x=1.5, which gives us the same length as before.
Thus, the maximum length is 25.
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