2013 AIME II Problems/Problem 4
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 1
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 length of
to be
. Therefore,
. Therefore
yielding an answer of
.
Solution 2
Rather than considering the Cartesian plane, we use complex numbers. Thus A is 1 and B is .
Recall that a rotation of radians counterclockwise is equivalent to multiplying a complex number by
, but here we require a clockwise rotation, so we multiply by
to obtain C. Upon averaging the coordinates of A, B, and C, we obtain the coordinates of P, viz.
.
Therefore is
and the answer is
.
Solution 3
We can also consider the slopes of the lines. Midpoint of
has coordinates
. Because line
has slope
, the slope of line
is
.
Since is equilateral, and since point
is the centroid, we can quickly calculate that
. Then, define
and
to be the differences between points
and
. Because of the slope, it is clear that
.
We can then use the Pythagorean Theorem on line segment :
yields
and
, after substituting
. The coordinates of P are thus
. Multiplying these together gives us
, giving us
as our answer.
See Also
2013 AIME II (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | ||
Preceded by Problem 3 |
Followed by Problem 5 | |
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 | ||
All AIME Problems and Solutions |
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