Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 6.2 National Olympiad Prove it Romania

Let ABCDABCD be a cyclic quadrilateral. The line parallel to BDBD passing through AA meets the line parallel to ACAC passing through BB at EE. The circumcircle of triangle ABEABE meets the lines ECEC and EDED, again, at FF and GG, respectively. Prove that the lines ABAB, CDCD and FGFG are either parallel or concurrent.

Figure 1

Solution

Angles ACB\angle ACB and ADB\angle ADB are equal, therefore points CC and DD are either both in the interior of the circumcircle of triangle ABEABE, or both on this circle, or both outside this circle. Thus we distinguish three cases:

1. F(EC)F \in (EC) and G(ED)G \in (ED),
2. F=CF = C, G=DG = D (in this case the statement of the problem is obvious),
3. C(EF)C \in (EF), D(EG)D \in (EG).

We only treat the first case, the last one being similar. We have
GDC=GDB+BDC=GEA+BAC=AG2+ABE=AG+AE2=GFE, \angle GDC = \angle GDB + \angle BDC = \angle GEA + \angle BAC = \frac{AG}{2} + \angle ABE = \frac{AG+AE}{2} = \angle GFE,
which shows that the quadrilateral FGDCFGDC is cyclic.

We notice that line ABAB is the radical axis of the circumcircles of triangle ABEABE and quadrilateral ABCDABCD, line FGFG is the radical axis of the circumcircles of triangle ABEABE and quadrilateral FGDCFGDC, and line CDCD is the radical axis of the circumcircles of the quadrilaterals ABCDABCD and FGDCFGDC. It is well known that the radical axis of three circles are either parallel (if the three centers are collinear) or concurrent (in the radical center of the three circles).

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