1990 AHSME Problems/Problem 25
Problem
Nine congruent spheres are packed inside a unit cube in such a way that one of them has its center at the center of the cube and each of the others is tangent to the center sphere and to three faces of the cube. What is the radius of each sphere?
Solution
Let be the radius, let be the center of the cube, and let be the center of one of the eight outer spheres, noting that .
Back, in the corner of the unit cube, a smaller cube whose inner corner coincides with . The cube is of dimensions and its space diagonal is of length . Thus the space diagonal of the unit cube is . Solving for , we get
See also
1990 AHSME (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | ||
Preceded by Problem 24 |
Followed by Problem 26 | |
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