2013 AIME II Problems/Problem 4
In the Cartesian plane let and
. Equilateral triangle
is constructed so that
lies in the first quadrant. Let
be the center of
. Then
can be written as
, where
and
are relatively prime positive integers and
is an integer that is not divisible by the square of any prime. Find
.
Solution
The distance from point to point
is
. The vector that starts at point A and ends at point B is given by
. Since the center of an equilateral triangle,
, is also the intersection of the perpendicular bisectors of the sides of the triangle, we need first find the equation for the perpendicular bisector to
. The line perpendicular to
through the midpoint,
,
can be parameterized by
. At this point, it is useful to note that
is a 30-60-90 triangle with
measuring
. This yields the lenght of
to be
. Therefore,
. Therefore
yielding an answer of
.