2018 AIME I Problems/Problem 13
Contents
Problem
Let have side lengths , , and . Point lies in the interior of , and points and are the incenters of and , respectively. Find the minimum possible area of as varies along .
Solution 1 (Official MAA)
First note that is a constant not depending on , so by it suffices to minimize . Let , , , and . Remark that Applying the Law of Sines to gives Analogously one can derive , and so with equality when , that is, when is the foot of the perpendicular from to . In this case the desired area is . To make this feasible to compute, note that Applying similar logic to and and simplifying yields a final answer of
Solution 2 (A more elegant, but lengthy, approach)
First, instead of using angles to find , let's try to find the area of other, simpler figures, and subtract that from . However, to do this, we need to be able to figure out the length of the inradii, and so, we need to find .
To minimize , intuitively, we should try to minimize the length of , since, after using the formula for the area of a triangle, we'll be able to minimize the inradii lengths, and thus, eventually minimize the area of . (Proof needed here).
We need to minimize . Let , , and . After an application of Stewart's Theorem, we will get that To minimize this quadratic, whereby we conclude that .
From here, draw perpendiculars down from and to and respectively, and label the foot of these perpendiculars and respectively. After, draw the inradii from to , and from to , and draw in .
Label the foot of the inradii to and , and , respectively. From here, we see that to find , we need to find , and subtract off the sum of and .
can be found by finding the area of two quadrilaterals as well as the area of a trapezoid . If we let the inradius of be and if we let the inradius of be , we'll find, after an application of basic geometry and careful calculations on paper, that .
The area of two triangles can be found in a similar fashion, however, we must use substitution to solve for as well as . After doing this, we'll get a similar sum in terms of and for the area of those two triangles which is equal to
Now we're set. Summing up the area of the Hexagon and the two triangles and simplifying, we get that the formula for is just
Using Heron's formula, . Solving for and using Heron's in and , we get that and . From here, we just have to plug into our above equation and solve.
Doing so gets us that the minimum area of
-Mathislife52 ~edited by phoenixfire
See Also
2018 AIME I (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | ||
Preceded by Problem 12 |
Followed by Problem 14 | |
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 | ||
All AIME Problems and Solutions |
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