UNK Given a cyclic quadrilateral , let the diagonals and meet at and the lines and meet at . The midpoints of and are and , respectively. Show that is tangent at to the circle through the points , , and .
Solution
It suffices to show that (see Figure 1), since in circle the angle over the chord at equals the angle between the tangent at and . First, . Since triangles and have also a common interior angle at , they are similar. ! Figure 1 Denote by the transformation consisting of a reflection at the bisector of followed by a dilation with center and factor of . Then maps to to to , and to . To see this, note that , so . Moreover, as , the image of the line under is parallel to (and passes through ) and similarly the image of is parallel to and passes through . Hence is mapped to the point which is the fourth vertex of the parallelogram . Thus, in particular . As is the midpoint of the diagonal of the parallelogram , it is also the midpoint of . In particular, are collinear, and . Denote by the fourth vertex of the parallelogram . By an analogous reasoning as before, it follows that maps to , thus are collinear with . Therefore, by the intercept theorem, . From the construction of it is clear that the lines and are symmetric with respect to the bisector of , as are and . Thus, are collinear, which together with implies . This completes the proof.