Let be an acute triangle, and let be the midpoint of . A circle passing through and meets the sides and again at and , respectively. Let be the point such that the quadrilateral is a parallelogram. Suppose that lies on the circumcircle of the triangle . Determine all possible values of . (Russia) Answer. .
Solution
Let be the center of the parallelogram , and let be the point on the ray such that (see Figure 1). It follows that is a parallelogram. Then, and , and so the triangles and are similar. It follows that and are corresponding medians in these triangles. Hence,
Since and , the triangles and are similar. Again, as and are corresponding medians in these triangles, we have
Now we deal separately with two cases. Case 1. does not lie on . Since the configuration is symmetric between and , we may assume that and lie on the same side with respect to the line .
Applying (1) and (2), we get
and so the triangles and are similar. We now have , so . Case 2. lies on . It follows from (2) that (see Figure 2). Thus, and . Hence, , so and . !
Figure 1 !
Figure 2
Comment 1. Here is another way to show that the triangles and are similar. Denote by the circumcircle of the triangle . Let be the second point of intersection of and , and let be the spiral similarity centered at mapping to . Then, one may show that maps each point on to a point on such that , and are collinear (see Figure 3). If we let and be the second points of intersection of with and of with , respectively, then it follows that the triangle is the image of under . We now obtain , which implies the desired result. !
Figure 3 !
Figure 4