For a convex quadrilateral , let denote the sum of the lengths of its diagonals and let denote its perimeter. Determine, with proof, all possible values of .
Solution
Suppose we have a convex quadrilateral with diagonals and intersecting at . To prove the lower bound, note that by the triangle inequality, and , so . Similarly, , so gives . To prove the upper bound, note that again by the triangle inequality, . Adding these yields . Now since is convex, is inside the quadrilateral, so and . Thus . To achieve every real value in this range, first consider a square . This has . Suppose now that we have a rectangle with and , where . As approaches 0, gets arbitrarily close to 1, so by intermediate value theorem, we hit every value . To achieve the other values, we let and let vary from down to (i.e. a rhombus that gets thinner). This means and . We have and . When , and when . Thus by the intermediate value theorem, we are able to choose to obtain any value in the range . Putting this construction together with the strict upper and lower bounds, we find that all possible values of are all real values in the open interval .