Two 18-24-30 triangles in the plane share the same circumcircle as well as the same incircle. What's the area of the region common to both the triangles?
Solution
Notice, first of all, that is 6 times , so the triangles are right. Thus, the midpoint of the hypotenuse of each is the center of their common circumcircle, and the inradius is . Let one of the triangles be , where . Now the line joining the midpoints of sides and is tangent to the incircle, because it is the right distance (12) from line . So, the hypotenuse of the other triangle lies along . We may formulate this thus: The hypotenuse of each triangle is parallel to the shorter leg, and therefore perpendicular to the longer leg, of the other. Now it is not hard to see, as a result of these parallel and perpendicularisms, that the other triangle "cuts off" at each vertex of a smaller, similar right triangle. If we compute the dimensions of these smaller triangles, we find that they are as follows: 9-12-15 at at , and 3-4-5 at . The total area chopped off of is thus The area of is . The area of the region common to both the original triangles is thus .