Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / South-Afrika /5 of 64

South-Afrika, 2011

Geometry Difficulty 4.5 AIME Prove it South Africa

Given a scalene triangle ABCABC with ∣AB∣+∣CA∣=2∣BC∣|AB| + |CA| = 2|BC|, show that the line joining the incenter and the centroid of the triangle is parallel to BCBC.

Solution

Adopting the usual notation, 2a=b+c2a = b + c, hence s=a+b+c=32as = a + b + c = \frac{3}{2}a. The area of the triangle is K=sr=32ar=12ahaK = sr = \frac{3}{2}ar = \frac{1}{2}a h_a, where hah_a is the altitude from AA onto BCBC. Therefore ha=3rh_a = 3r, and so the incenter is a third of the way to the vertex. The centroid is also a third of the way to the vertex; therefore the line joining the incenter and centroid is parallel to BCBC.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,604 problems in a working order, from Junior Challenge level to the IMO shortlist.

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