A hexagonal prism has a height of 165 cm. Its two hexagonal faces are regular hexagons with sides of length 30 cm. Its other six faces are rectangles. A fly and an ant start at point on the bottom face and travel to point on the top face. The fly flies directly along the shortest route through the prism. The ant crawls around the outside of the prism along a path of constant slope so that it winds around the prism exactly times, for some positive integer . The distance crawled by the ant is more than 20 times the distance flown by the fly. What is the smallest possible value of ?
Solution
Throughout this solution, we remove the units (cm) as each length is in these same units. First, we calculate the distance flown by the fly, which we call . Let be the point on the base on the prism directly underneath . Since the hexagonal base has side length 30, then . This is because a hexagon is divided into 6 equilateral triangles by its diagonals, and so the length of the diagonal is twice the side length of one of these triangles, which is twice the side length of the hexagon. Also, is right-angled at , since lies in the horizontal base and is vertical. By the Pythagorean Theorem, since , then . Therefore, . Next, we calculate the distance crawled by the ant, which we call . Since the ant crawls around the prism and its crawls along all 6 of the vertical faces each time around the prism, then it crawls along a total of faces. To find , we 'unwrap' the exterior of the prism. Since the ant passes through faces, it travels a 'horizontal' distance of . Since the ant moves from the bottom of the prism to the top of the prism, it passes through a vertical distance of 165. Since the ant's path has a constant slope, its path forms the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle with base of length and height of length 165. By the Pythagorean Theorem, since , then . Now, we want to be at least . In other words, we want to find the smallest possible value of for which . Since these quantities are positive, the inequality is equivalent to the inequality . The following inequalities are equivalent: , , , , (since both sides are positive), , . Therefore, the smallest positive integer for which this is true is .