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VIII OBM

Brazil geometry

Problem

A ball moves endlessly on a circular billiard table. When it hits the edge it is reflected. Show that if it passes through a point on the table three times, then it passes through it infinitely many times.
Solution
Suppose and are two successive chords of the ball's path. Then by the reflection law . But and are isosceles and so . Hence . So every chord of the path is the same length .

We now claim that through any given point inside the circle there are at most two chords length . Let and be a chord containing , with and . The power of with respect to the circle is or . This means that always divides the chords containing it in two segments of fixed lengths and . Now if three chords passes through , the circle with center and radius would cut the circle of the billiard table three times, a contradiction.

Thus if the path passes through more than twice, then on two occasions it must be moving along the same chord . That implies that is a rational multiple of and hence the path will traverse repeatedly.

Techniques

Radical axis theoremAngle chasingConstructions and loci