Let be a triangle. Let be the midpoint of , and let be the centroid of . Let be a point on the segment . A straight line passing through meets the sides and at and respectively (with ). Show that
When does the equality hold? (Here is the area of the polygon , etc.)
IMO Hk TST
Solution
Let and be the points on and such that , , are collinear and . Since and have the same base and the same height, they have the same area. This yields
The last inequality holds since and have the same base , but is closer to the sideline than . Equality holds when , i.e. . Similarly, we have , with equality . Thus, we have
since is the midpoint of and . It suffices to prove .
Let and be the points on and such that are collinear and . As with ratio , we have .
Therefore, it remains to show . WLOG assume lies on the segment and lies on the segment . Then we only need to show . Indeed, let be the symmetric point of in . Then , so that lies on the line . Also, must lie on the segment since
It follows that as desired. Equality holds when and , i.e. and .