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Bulgaria

Bulgaria geometry

Problem

Given a and a function with the following property: for any segment of the interior of the triangle and its midpoint one has that where denotes the distance from to the boundary of . Prove that for any segment of the interior of and any point on this segment we have
Solution
Denote by the incircle of . It is clear that the image of is the interval .

Varying and on , it follows that is a mid-point concave function on , i.e. .

Note that the points on given distance (from the boundary) form a triangle homothetic to (with center of homothety ) and the mid-points of the segments with ends at these points run over the whole interior of this triangle. It follows that is an increasing function on .

Since is a mid-point concave and increasing function, then it is continuous. Indeed, if and are the left- and the right-hand limit of at (), then and (why?) and hence . So is a convex and increasing function.

Then, since is a concave function, it is easy to see that is a concave function. This also follows from the fact that is a mid-point concave and continuous function (because of the continuity of and ).

Techniques

Jensen/smoothingJensen / smoothingHomothetyTriangle centers: centroid, incenter, circumcenter, orthocenter, Euler line, nine-point circleConstructions and loci