Skip to main content
OlympiadHQ

Browse · MATH

Print

jmc

geometry senior

Problem

Let be a right triangle with , , and . Let be the inscribed circle. Construct with on and on , such that is perpendicular to and tangent to . Construct with on and on such that is perpendicular to and tangent to . Let be the inscribed circle of and the inscribed circle of . The distance between the centers of and can be written as . What is ?
Solution
Let be at the origin. Using the formula on , where is the inradius (similarly define to be the radii of ), is the semiperimeter, and is the area, we find . Or, the inradius could be directly by using the formula , where and are the legs of the right triangle and is the hypotenuse. (This formula should be used only for right triangles.) Thus lie respectively on the lines , and so . Note that . Since the ratio of corresponding lengths of similar figures are the same, we have Let the centers of be , respectively; then by the distance formula we have . Therefore, the answer is .
Final answer
725