Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Prove it Italy

Problem:

Let ABCDABCD be a generic tetrahedron of which we know the length aa of the edge ABAB and the area SS of the projection of the tetrahedron onto a plane perpendicular to the line through AA and BB.
Determine the volume of the tetrahedron.

Solution

Solution:

Let π\pi be the plane through AA perpendicular to the edge ABAB, and let CC', DD' be the projections of CC and DD onto π\pi. The projection of the tetrahedron ABCDABCD onto π\pi is the triangle ACDAC'D'.

Figure 1

The volume of the tetrahedron ABCDABCD is equal to that of the tetrahedron ABCDABC'D, since the two tetrahedra have the same base ABDABD and the vertices CC, CC' lie on a line parallel to the base plane. In the same way one sees that the tetrahedra ABCDABC'D and ABCDABC'D' have the same volume, having the same base ABCABC' and vertices DD, DD' on a line parallel to the base plane. It follows that the volume of ABCDABCD is equal to that of ABCDABC'D'; since ABAB is perpendicular to π\pi, this volume is given by 13aS\frac{1}{3} a S.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from it; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.