Consider four lines in the plane, any two of which intersect, but no three have a common point. Show that in this case, the four orthocenters of the triangles determined by the lines lie on a single line.
Solution
In the solution, we will use the concept of the power of a point with respect to a circle, as well as the power line of two circles, and their fundamental properties. Definitions and statements related to this can be found, for example, in the 923rd and 931st problems of the Collection of Geometric Problems II.
First, we prove an auxiliary theorem:
(*) Let and be arbitrary points on the line segments and of triangle . Then the power line of the circles with diameters and contains the orthocenter of triangle .
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Figure 1
Let the feet of the altitudes from and to the opposite sides of triangle be and , respectively, and let the circles with diameters and be denoted by and (Figure 1). Then , so point lies on circle , and point lies on circle ; furthermore, points and lie on the circle with diameter . Therefore, the power of point with respect to circles and is and , respectively, which are equal because both are equal to the power of point with respect to circle . Thus, point lies on the power line of the two circles.
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Now let's turn to the solution of our original problem. Let the 6 intersection points of the 4 lines be denoted as as shown in Figure 2. Choose 2 pairs of opposite points from the 6 intersection points - that is, points that do not lie on the same line - in our diagram, and . We claim that the power line of the circles with diameters and contains all four orthocenters. This follows from our auxiliary theorem, if we apply it four times with the following choices:
With this, we have proven the statement of our problem.