Centroid

Revision as of 10:10, 18 August 2006 by Joml88 (talk | contribs)

This article is a stub. Help us out by expanding it.

The centroid of a triangle is the point of intersection of the medians of the triangle and is generally denoted $G$. The centroid has the special property that, for each median, the distance from a vertex to the centroid is twice that of the distance from the centroid to the midpoint of the side opposite that vertex. Also, the three medians of a triangle divide it into six regions of equal area. The centroid is the center of mass of the triangle; in other words, if you connected a string to the centroid of a triangle and held the other end of the string, the triangle would be level.

The coordinates of the centroid of a coordinatized triangle is (a,b), where a is the arithmetic average of the x-coordinates of the vertices of the triangle and b is the arithmetic average of the y-coordinates of the triangle.


Centroid.PNG


Proof of concurrency of the medians of a triangle

By Ceva's Theorem, we must show that $AO\cdot BM\cdot CN =OB\cdot MC\cdot NA$. But this falls directly from the fact that $AO=OB, BM=MC,$ and $CN=NA$.


See also