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Geometry Difficulty 8.1 Shortlist Prove it Romania

The vertices of two acute triangles all lie on a same circle. The midpoints of two sides of one triangle both lie on the nine-point circle of the other triangle. Show that the two triangles share the same nine-point circle.

Solution

The proof is based on a well-known fact recalled in the lemma below.

Lemma. Let ABCABC be a triangle and let OO and ω\omega be its circumcentre and nine-point centre, respectively. Then the reflexion OO' of OO in the line BCBC lies on the line ωA\omega A, and ω\omega is the midpoint of the segment OAO'A.

Figure 1
Figure 2

If Γ\Gamma and Γ\Gamma' do not coincide, then they are clearly the reflexion of one another in the line YZYZ, and, consequently, so are their centres. Let OO' be the centre of Γ\Gamma'. By the lemma, the nine-point centre of the triangle XYZXYZ is the midpoint of the segment OXO'X which in turn is the centre of γ\gamma and the conclusion follows.

If Γ\Gamma and Γ\Gamma' coincide, recall that the homotheties mapping γ\gamma to Γ\Gamma are: one of ratio 22 centred at the orthocentre HH of the triangle ABCABC; and one of ratio 2-2 centred at the centroid of the triangle ABCABC. Consequently, X=HX = H, so the triangle ABCABC is right-angled which case is ruled out by hypothesis.

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