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+(n3)180°.


Now let's call the intersection of line b and a X1 and the intersection of b and c X2. To prove that X1=X2 I'm going to show that P1X1=P1X2


First, let's look at X1. This one is easy. Because P1P2X1 is isosceles we can immediately conclude that P1P2=P1X1


X2 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 P18P1X2P17. We're now going to prove that AB=BC and therefore P1X2=P1P18=P1P2=P1X1


Rotate B around E by 60, call it C. Then CBC and BED are congruent because CBC=BED=20, BCC=EBD=10, and BE=CB. Therefore BC=DE=AB



This means that X1=X2 so they intersect at the same point


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