Skip to main content
OlympiadHQ

Browse · MATH

Print

jmc

geometry senior

Problem

Polyhedron is inscribed in a sphere of radius (meaning that all vertices of lie on the sphere surface). What is the least upper bound on the ratio In other words, what is the smallest real number such that must be true for all polyhedra that can be inscribed in a sphere of radius ?
Solution
Let be the center of the sphere, and assume for now that is inside polyhedron . We can carve polyhedron into pyramids, each of which has a face of as its base and as its apex. For example, a cube would be carved into six pyramids, two of which are highlighted in this drawing: Then if we add up the areas of all the pyramids' bases, we get the surface area of . If we add up the volumes of the pyramids, we get the volume of .

The volume of each pyramid is equal to . The height of each pyramid must be less than , since the height of each pyramid extends from to a point inside the sphere. Therefore, the volume of each pyramid is less than times the area of the base. It follows that the volume of is less than times the surface area of . We can, however, make this ratio arbitrarily close to by selecting polyhedra with many small faces, so that the height of each pyramid is as close as we wish to .

Therefore, for polyhedra inscribed in a sphere of radius such that the center of the sphere lies inside the polyhedron, the least upper bound on is . Finally, we must consider the case of inscribed polyhedra for which the center of the sphere does not lie inside the polyhedron. However, in this case, we can still construct pyramids with apex whose bases are the faces of ; then the surface area of is still the sum of the areas of the bases, but the volume of is less than the total volume of the pyramids. This only strengthens the argument for an upper bound of . So, the answer is .
Final answer
12