Showing posts with label collinearity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label collinearity. Show all posts

Friday, October 24, 2014

Problem Post 2-2: A Sampler of `Olympiad' Geometry Concepts

Problem Posts
[Level 4]
Henry
This post is meant to be a `sampler' of sorts, to show the most common tag words one will see in olympiad geometry problems.
I've been fortunate enough to find two remarkable problems, and solve them in ways that form a whirlwind tour of the subject. The first problem demonstrates side chasing, isosceles triangles, some cyclic quadrilaterals and spiral similarity. The second problem demonstrates power theorems, cyclic quadrilaterals, collinearity, and triangle geometry.

Problem 1

This one comes from Andreescu and Gelca's Mathematical Olympiad Challenges.

QUESTION
(Andreescu, Gelca) Let $B$ and $C$ be the endpoints and $A$ the midpoint of a semicircle. Let $M$ be a point on the line segment $AC$, and $P$, $Q$ the feet of the perpendiculars from $A$ and $C$ to the line $BM$, respectively. Prove that $BP=PQ+QC$.