Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 6.9 National olympiad Prove it Austria

Let ABCDABCD be an inscribed convex quadrilateral with diagonals ACAC and BDBD. Each of the four vertices is reflected on the diagonal it does not lie on.
Prove that the resulting four points lie on a common circle or a common line.

a. Investigate when the four resulting points lie on a common line and give a simple equivalent condition for the quadrilateral ABCDABCD.

b. Prove that in all other cases, the four resulting points lie on a common circle.

Solution

a. We denote the reflections of AA, BB, CC and DD with AA', BB', CC' resp. DD' and we denote the intersection of the diagonals with SS. Since the points AA and CC are reflected in the same line BDBD and the point SS remains invariant under this reflection, the whole line ASCASC becomes ASCA'SC' after reflection in BDBD. Analogously, the line BSDBSD becomes BSDB'SD' after reflection in ACAC.
If we denote the smaller angle between the two diagonals by φ\varphi, these two actions on the lines correspond to a rotation of the line ACAC with center SS in direction BDBD with rotation angle 2φ2\varphi and a rotation of the line BDBD with center SS in direction ACAC with rotation angle 2φ2\varphi.
Therefore, the angle between the lines ASCA'SC' and BSDB'SD' is the angle 3φ3\varphi. This has to be a multiple of 180180^{\circ}, so that the original angle has to be 00^{\circ} or 6060^{\circ}. The first case is not possible since the points of the inscribed quadrilateral cannot lie on a line.
We obtain that the four new points lie on a line if and only if the diagonals of the given inscribed quadrilateral make an angle of 6060^{\circ}.

Figure 1
Figure 3: Problem 17

b. Since the reflections do not only preserve the collinearity of ASCASC and BSDBSD, but also the position of SS between the two points and the distances to the two points, we want to use the power of SS with respect to the circle ABCDABCD.

Because of the reflections, we have
SA=SA,SB=SB,SC=SC,SD=SD SA = SA', \quad SB = SB', \quad SC = SC', \quad SD = SD'

and since ABCDABCD is an inscribed quadrilateral, we have
SASC=SBSD. SA \cdot SC = SB \cdot SD.
Therefore, we obtain
SASC=SASC=SBSD=SBSD. SA' \cdot SC' = SA \cdot SC = SB \cdot SD = SB' \cdot SD'.
Since the two lines ASCA'SC' and BSDB'SD' do not coincide in this case, we can apply the properties of the power of a point in reverse, and we get that AA', BB', CC' and DD' lie on a circle.

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