Problem:
Three circles of unit radius are tangent to one another and a fourth circle is tangent to all three, and does not enclose them. What is the radius of the fourth circle?
Problem:
Three circles of unit radius are tangent to one another and a fourth circle is tangent to all three, and does not enclose them. What is the radius of the fourth circle?
Pick one
Solution:
The answer is (D). Let us call the first three circles and the fourth one, and let be their respective centers. The triangle is evidently equilateral (each of its sides equals twice the radius of the circles , that is, it is equal to 2). The point is equidistant from , and is therefore the circumcenter of . The distance is then equal to the radius of the circle circumscribed about an equilateral triangle with side 2. Since in an equilateral triangle the circumcenter coincides with the centroid, and the centroid divides each median in ratio , we have that is also equal to of the median (or equivalently, the altitude) issuing from . Since the angle at is , the length of this altitude can be calculated as . We therefore obtain that the length is . This length, however, is also equal to the sum of the radii of and , so by subtraction we obtain that the radius of is .