Let be a quadrilateral with . Let be a point in the plane (not necessarily inside the quadrilateral). Find the minimum possible value of .
Solution
By the triangle inequality, and . So should be on and ; i.e. it should be the intersection of the two diagonals. Then , which is easily computed to be by the Pythagorean theorem. Note that we require the intersection of the diagonals to actually exist for this proof to work, but is convex and this is not an issue.
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