Maths Olympiad Prep

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Geometry Difficulty 6.1 National olympiad Prove it

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 XX and YY be arbitrary points on the line segments ACAC and BCBC of triangle ABCABC. Then the power line of the circles with diameters AYAY and BXBX contains the orthocenter MM of triangle ABCABC.

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Figure 1

Let the feet of the altitudes from AA and BB to the opposite sides of triangle ABCABC be A1A_1 and B1B_1, respectively, and let the circles with diameters AYAY and BXBX be denoted by kAk_A and kBk_B (Figure 1). Then AA1Y=BB1X=90\angle AA_1Y = \angle BB_1X = 90^\circ, so point A1A_1 lies on circle kAk_A, and point B1B_1 lies on circle kBk_B; furthermore, points A1A_1 and B1B_1 lie on the circle kk with diameter ABAB. Therefore, the power of point MM with respect to circles kAk_A and kBk_B is MAMA1MA \cdot MA_1 and MBMB1MB \cdot MB_1, respectively, which are equal because both are equal to the power of point MM with respect to circle kk. Thus, point MM 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 P,Q,R,S,T,UP, Q, R, S, T, U 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, P,UP, U and S,QS, Q. We claim that the power line of the circles with diameters PUPU and SQSQ contains all four orthocenters. This follows from our auxiliary theorem, if we apply it four times with the following choices:

1. 2. 3. 4.A:PPSQB:SQUUC:RTTRX:QSPPY:UUQS \begin{aligned} & \text{1. 2. 3. 4.} \\ & A: P P S Q \\ & B: S Q U U \\ & C: R T T R \\ & X: Q S P P \\ & Y: U U Q S \end{aligned}

With this, we have proven the statement of our problem.

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.