Point is on the -axis with -coordinate greater than 0 and less than 100. A circle is drawn through and . How many possible positions for are there so that the radius of this circle is an integer?
Solution
Suppose that has coordinates for some real number . Since has -coordinate greater than 0 and less than 100, then or . We determine an expression for the radius of the circle in terms of and then determine how many values of give an integer radius. We determine the desired expression by first finding the coordinates of the centre, , of the circle in terms of , and then calculating the distance from to one of the points . If a circle passes through the three vertices and of a triangle, then its centre is the point of intersection of the perpendicular bisectors of the sides , and of the triangle. We determine the centre of the circle by finding the point of intersection of the perpendicular bisectors of and . (We could use instead, but this would be more complicated algebraically.) Since has coordinates and has coordinates , then is vertical so its perpendicular bisector is horizontal. The midpoint of is . Therefore, the perpendicular bisector of is the horizontal line through , and so has equation . Since has coordinates and has coordinates , then has slope . Therefore, a line perpendicular to has slope -1. The midpoint of is . Therefore, the perpendicular bisector of has slope -1 and passes through , so has equation or . The centre of the desired circle is thus the point of intersection of the lines with equations and . The -coordinate of this point is and the -coordinate is obtained by solving and obtaining . Therefore, the coordinates of are . The radius, , of the circle is the distance from to any of the three points and . It is easiest to find the distance from to , which is . We rewrite this as . Since and only when , then the minimum value of is 8 and this occurs when . Thus, . The expression is decreasing from to and then increasing from to . When . When . When . Therefore, when , we have and when , we have . The expression will take every real number value in each of these ranges, because represents the equation of a parabola which is a 'smooth' curve. Between and 4, there is one integer value (namely, 3) which is achieved by the expression. (We do not count 4 since it is an endpoint that is not included.) Between and , there are 65 integer values (namely, 3 to 67, inclusive) which are achieved by the expression. In total, there are integer values achieved by the expression in the allowable range for , so there are 66 positions of for which the radius is an integer.