Olympiad Maths Prep

Track / Stage 9 / 18 of 80 #1898 of 2000

Problem 1898

IMO P2/P5; hard shortlist
Geometry Difficulty 9.1 Prove it Baltic Way shortlist · Baltic Way

Let MM be a subset of a plane sufficing following properties:
1) There is no single line kk, such that MkM \subset k.
2) For any parallelogram ABCDABCD if A,B,CMA, B, C \in M, then DMD \in M.
3) If A,BMA, B \in M, then AB>1|AB| > 1.

Prove, that there are two families of parallel lines, such that MM is a set consisting of all intersection points of lines from the first family with lines from the second family.

This one wants a proof. Work it on paper, read the official solution, then mark yourself honestly — the ladder only means something if the record is true.

Official solution

At the beginning we can see that property 3) implies that in any bounded subset of a plane there is only a finite number of points from MM. (*)

Next, we can see that if for some points A,BMA, B \in M we define by ϕ\phi a translation by vector AB\overrightarrow{AB}, then for any point CMC \in M we also have ϕ(C)M\phi(C) \in M. (**)

Indeed: thanks to property 1) we know that there is a point PMP \in M that does not belong to line ABAB. Therefore, from 2) we can imply that there is a point RMR \in M, such that ABRPABRP is a parallelogram, and therefore PR=AB\overrightarrow{PR} = \overrightarrow{AB}. Now it is sufficient to see that point CC does not belong to line ABAB or does not belong to line PRPR, so ϕ(C)M\phi(C) \in M by property 2), as the fourth vertex of parallelogram BACϕ(C)BAC\phi(C) or RPCϕ(C)RPC\phi(C), which concludes the proof of (**). It is worth mentioning that we can say the same about ϕ1\phi^{-1} (translation by vector BA\overrightarrow{BA}). It shows that ϕ\phi is a one-to-one mapping of set MM on itself.

We will show now that we can choose such a parallelogram (we will call it “basic”) with vertices in MM, which does not contain any other points from MM (except vertices). Indeed: thanks to (*) we can pick line segment ABAB with ends in MM, which won't contain any other points from MM. Thanks to properties 1) and 2) we know that we can find parallelogram ABCDABCD with vertices in MM. If ABCDABCD is not basic, by (*), from the finitely many points from MM contained inside ABCDABCD we can pick point EE that lies closest to the line ABAB. Then, as we know from 2) we can get parallelogram ABEFABEF with vertices in MM, which either is basic or it contains point QMQ \in M belonging to ABEFABEF but not on segment EFEF (then translation of QQ by vector AB\overrightarrow{AB} belongs to ABCDABCD and lies closer to line ABAB than EE, a contradiction) or it contains point QMQ \in M on segment EFEF (in this case the translation of AA by vector ±EQ\pm\overrightarrow{EQ} is a point of MM lying inside segment ABAB, a contradiction).

To sum things up, we have to see that if we get basic parallelogram ABCDABCD with vertices in MM, and define ϕ\phi as a translation by vector AB\overrightarrow{AB}, and define ψ\psi as a translation by vector AD\overrightarrow{AD}, then we can define a set Z={ϕkψl(A):k,lZ}Z = \{\phi^k \circ \psi^l(A) : k, l \in \mathbb{Z}\}, which now is easy to see, is equal to MM. It is obvious that Z=MZ = M fulfills the thesis.

Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic, difficulty and ordering added by this site.