Given are two circles and which intersect at two distinct points and . Construct a circle that contains and and which is tangent to and at points and , respectively, such that , , are collinear. Justify your construction.
Solution
Description of the construction. Let and denote the centres of the circles and , respectively. Draw the circle centre that passes through and let and be its intersection points with and , respectively. Next construct the angle bisector of , then the perpendicular to this angle bisector that passes through . Let and be the points where this perpendicular intersects and , respectively. Let be the point where the lines and meet. The circle centre that passes through is the required circle.
Justification of the construction. Let be the circle with centre that passes through . When we invert the two given circles in , we obtain the lines and , where and are the intersection points of with and , respectively. The required circle inverts to a circle which contains and which is tangent to and . The points of contact of the inverted circle with and , say and , are the inverses of and , respectively. Because is collinear with every pair of inverse points, are collinear exactly when are collinear. In this case, are collinear. Finally, because is perpendicular to the angle bisector of angle , the points and must be on the perpendicular to this angle bisector that passes through .