Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /1022 of 1394

Geometry Difficulty 5.5 AIME, harder Prove it United 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?

Figure 1

Solution

Solution:

Let the line segment have endpoints AA and BB. Without loss of generality, let AA lie below the lines x+y=3x+y=\sqrt{3} (as this will cause BB to be above the line x+y=3x+y=\sqrt{3}) and y=xy=x (we can reflect about y=xy=x to get the rest of the cases):

Figure 2

Now, note that as AA ranges from (0,0)(0,0) to (1.5,0)(1.5,0), BB will range from (1,1)(1,1) to (1,2)(1,2) to (0,2)(0,2), as indicated by the red line segments. Note that these line segments are contained in a rectangle bounded by x=0x=0, y=0y=0, x=1.5x=1.5, and y=2y=2, and so the longest line segment in this case has length 22+1.52=52\sqrt{2^{2}+1.5^{2}}=\frac{5}{2}.

As for the rest of the cases, as A=(x,0)A=(x, 0) ranges from (1.5,0)(1.5,0) to (3,0)(\sqrt{3}, 0), BB will be the point (0,3x)\left(0, \frac{3}{x}\right), so it suffices to maximize x2+9x2\sqrt{x^{2}+\frac{9}{x^{2}}} given 1.5x31.5 \leq x \leq \sqrt{3}. Note that the further away x2x^{2} is from 33, the larger x2+9x2x^{2}+\frac{9}{x^{2}} gets, and so the maximum is achieved when x=1.5x=1.5, which gives us the same length as before.

Thus, the maximum length is 52\frac{5}{2}.

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