Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /182 of 520

Geometry Difficulty 5.0 AIME, harder Find the answer

6. As shown in Figure 1, on a 2×32 \times 3 rectangular grid paper, the vertices of each small square are called lattice points. Then the number of isosceles right triangles with lattice points as vertices is:

Pick one

Solution

6.D.

The length of line segments with grid points as vertices can take 8 values: 1,21, \sqrt{2}, 2,5,22,3,10,132, \sqrt{5}, 2 \sqrt{2}, 3, \sqrt{10}, \sqrt{13}. The isosceles right triangles formed by these line segments can be classified into 4 cases based on their side lengths:
1,1,2;2,2,2;2,2,22;5,5,10 1,1, \sqrt{2} ; \sqrt{2}, \sqrt{2}, 2 ; 2,2,2 \sqrt{2} ; \sqrt{5}, \sqrt{5}, \sqrt{10} \text {. }

Below, we count the triangles by classifying them according to the length of the hypotenuse.
(1) When the hypotenuse is 2\sqrt{2}, the hypotenuse must be the diagonal of a small square. There are 12 such line segments, and each such line segment corresponds to two isosceles right triangles, totaling 2×12=242 \times 12=24.
(2) When the hypotenuse is 2, there are 10 line segments of length 2 in the figure, 6 of which are on the perimeter of a 2×32 \times 3 rectangle, each corresponding to one isosceles right triangle; the other 4 are inside the 2×32 \times 3 rectangle, each corresponding to two isosceles right triangles. In total, there are 6+2×4=146+2 \times 4=14.
(3) When the hypotenuse is 222 \sqrt{2}, the hypotenuse must be the diagonal of a 2×22 \times 2 square. There are 4 such line segments, each corresponding to two isosceles right triangles, totaling 2×4=82 \times 4=8.
(4) When the hypotenuse is 10\sqrt{10}, there are 4 such line segments, each corresponding to one isosceles right triangle, totaling 4.

Therefore, the number of isosceles right triangles with grid points as vertices is 24+14+8+4=5024+14+8+4=50.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

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