Find the angle of reflection such that a ball bounces 2012 times inside a square before returning to its starting point.
Solution
As per usual with reflection problems instead of bouncing off the sides of a square we imagine the ball to travel in a straight line from origin in an infinite grid of squares, 'bouncing' every time it meets a line or . Let the lattice point it first meets after leaving the origin be , so that . Note that and are coprime, otherwise the ball will reach a vertex before the 2012th bounce. We wish to minimize the slope of the line to this point from origin, which is . Now, the number of bounces up to this point is , so the given statement is just . To minimize with and relatively prime, we must have , so that the angle is
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