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jmc

geometry senior

Problem

A block of wood has the shape of a right circular cylinder with radius and height , and its entire surface has been painted blue. Points and are chosen on the edge of one of the circular faces of the cylinder so that on that face measures . The block is then sliced in half along the plane that passes through point , point , and the center of the cylinder, revealing a flat, unpainted face on each half. The area of one of these unpainted faces is , where , , and are integers and is not divisible by the square of any prime. Find .
problem
Solution
Label the points where the plane intersects the top face of the cylinder as and , and the center of the cylinder as , such that and are collinear. Let be the center of the bottom face, and the midpoint of . Then , (because of the 120 degree angle), and so . Project and onto the bottom face to get and , respectively. Then the section (whose area we need to find), is a stretching of the section on the bottom face. The ratio of stretching is , and we do not square this value when finding the area because it is only stretching in one direction. Using 30-60-90 triangles and circular sectors, we find that the area of the section is . Thus, the area of section is , and so our answer is .
Final answer
53