1999 AIME Problems/Problem 15
Problem
Consider the paper triangle whose vertices are and The vertices of its midpoint triangle are the midpoints of its sides. A triangular pyramid is formed by folding the triangle along the sides of its midpoint triangle. What is the volume of this pyramid?
Solution
Let , , be the feet of the altitudes to sides , , , respectively, of . The base of the tetrahedron is the orthocenter of the large triangle, so we just need to find that, then it's easy from there.
To find the coordinates of , we need to find the intersection point of altitudes and . The equation of is simply . is perpendicular to line , so the slope of is equal to the negative reciprocal of the slope of . has slope , therefore . These two lines intersect at , so that's the base of the height of the tetrahedron.
Let be the foot of altitude in . From the Pythagorean Theorem, . However, since and are, by coincidence, the same point, and .
The area of the base is , so the volume is .
Alternate Solution 1
Consider the diagram provided in the previous solution. We first note that the medial triangle has coordinates , , and . We can compute the area of this triangle as . Suppose are the coordinates of the vertex of the resulting pyramid. Call this point . Clearly, the height of the pyramid is . The desired volume is thus .
We note that when folding the triangle to form the pyramid, some side lengths must stay the same. In particular, , , and . We then use distance formula to find the distances from to each of the vertices of the medial triangle. We thus arrive at a fairly simple system of equations, yielding . The desired volume is thus .
Alternate Solution 2
The formed tetrahedron has pairwise parallel planar and oppositely equal length () edges and can be inscribed in a parallelepiped (rectangular box) with the six tetrahedral edges as non-intersecting diagonals of the box faces. Let the edge lengths of the parallelepiped be and solve (by Pythagoras)
to find that
Use the fact that the ratio of volumes between an inscribed tetrahedron and its circumscribing parallelepiped is and then the volume is
Solution by D. Adrian Tanner
See also
1999 AIME (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | ||
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