Centroid
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The centroid of a triangle is the point of intersection of the medians of the triangle and is conventionally denoted . 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.
Proof of concurrency of the medians of a triangle
Note: The existance of the centroid is a trivial consequence of Ceva's Theorem. However, there are many interesting and elegant ways to prove its existance, such as those shown below.
Proof 1
Readers unfamiliar with homothety should consult the second proof.
Let be the respective midpoints of sides
of triangle
. We observe that
are parallel to (and of half the length of)
, respectively. Hence the triangles
are homothetic with respect to some point
with dilation factor
; hence
all pass through
, and
. Q.E.D.
Proof 2
Let be a triangle, and let
be the respective midpoints of the segments
. Let
be the intersection of
and
. Let
be the respective midpoints of
. We observe that both
and
are parallel to
and of half the length of
. Hence
is a parallelogram. Since the diagonals of parallelograms bisect each other, we have
, or
. Hence each median passes through a similar trisection point of any other median; hence the medians concur. Q.E.D.
We note that both of these proofs give the result that the distance of a vertex of a point of a triangle to the centroid of the triangle is twice the distance from the centroid of the traingle to the midpoint of the opposite side.