An ant starts at the origin, facing in the positive -direction. Each second, it moves 1 unit forward, then turns counterclockwise by degrees. What is the least upper bound on the distance between the ant and the origin? (The least upper bound is the smallest real number that is at least as big as every distance that the ant ever is from the origin.)
Solution
We claim that the points the ant visits lie on a circle of radius . We show this by saying that the ant stays a constant distance from the point . Suppose the ant moves on a plane . Consider a transformation of the plane such that after the first move, the ant is at the origin of and facing in the direction of the axis (on ). The transformation to get from to can be gotten by rotating about the origin counterclockwise through an angle and then translating it 1 unit to the right. Observe that the point is fixed under this transformation, which can be shown through the expression . It follows that at every point the ant stops, it will always be the same distance from . Since it starts at , this fixed distance is . Since is not a rational multiple of , the points the ant stops at form a dense subset of the circle in question. As a result, the least upper bound on the distance between the ant and the origin is the diameter of the circle, which is .