Tuesday, 16 June 2015

mathematics - The adventitious 18-gon


Today I have drawn a regular 18-gon on a piece of paper. My drawing shows the 18 vertices of the polygon labeled as P1,P2,,P18 in clockwise order, and it also shows all 135 diagonals.


Now looking at my drawing, it seems to me that the three diagonals P1P10 and P2P14 and P4P17 intersect each other in a common point. I have put a lot of effort into my drawing, and tried to get it as precise as possible, but of course its precision is limited.



Question: Is it indeed true that these three diagonals intersect in a common point?





Answer



To illustrate the puzzle I made the following image:


enter image description here


All angles I entered can be simply calculated using the fact any n-gon has a total of 180 + (n-3) \cdot 180 °.


Now let's call the intersection of line b and a X_1 and the intersection of b and c X_2. To prove that X_1 = X_2 I'm going to show that P_1X_1 = P_1X_2


First, let's look at X_1. This one is easy. Because \triangle P_1P_2X_1 is isosceles we can immediately conclude that P_1P_2 = P_1X_1


X_2 is somewhat trickier. But basically it is https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1713162/given-the-following-quadrilateral-prove-ab-bc but I'll copy the relevant parts: enter image description here


In this image there is a quadrilateral ABCD which is congruent with P_{18}P_1X_2P_{17}. We're now going to prove that AB = BC and therefore P_1X_2 = P_1P_{18} = P_1P_2 = P_1X_1


Rotate B around E by 60^\circ, call it C^\prime. Then \triangle C^\prime BC and \triangle BED are congruent because \angle C^\prime BC=\angle BED =20^\circ, \angle BC^\prime C=\angle EBD=10^\circ, and BE=C^\prime B. Therefore BC = DE = AB



This means that X_1 = X_2 so they intersect at the same point


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