2015 AMC 12A Problems/Problem 25

Problem

A collection of circles in the upper half-plane, all tangent to the $x$ -axis, is constructed in layers as follows. Layer $L_0$ consists of two circles of radii $70^2$ and $73^2$ that are externally tangent. For $k>=1$ , the circles in $\bigcup_{j=0}^{k-1}L_j$ are ordered according to their points of tangency with the $x$ -axis. For every pair of consecutive circles in this order, a new circle is constructed externally tangent to each of the two circles in the pair. Layer $L_k$ consists of the $2^{k-1}$ circles constructed in this way. Let $S=\bigcup_{j=0}^{6}L_j$ , and for every circle $C$ denote by $r(C)$ its radius. What is $\sum_{C\in S} \frac{1}{\sqrt{r(C)}}?$

$[asy] import olympiad; size(350); defaultpen(linewidth(0.7)); // define a bunch of arrays and starting points pair[] coord = new pair[65]; int[] trav = {32,16,8,4,2,1}; coord[0] = (0,73^2); coord[64] = (2*73*70,70^2); // draw the big circles and the bottom line path arc1 = arc(coord[0],coord[0].y,260,360); path arc2 = arc(coord[64],coord[64].y,175,280); fill((coord[0].x-910,coord[0].y)--arc1--cycle,gray(0.75)); fill((coord[64].x+870,coord[64].y+425)--arc2--cycle,gray(0.75)); draw(arc1^^arc2); draw((-930,0)--(70^2+73^2+850,0)); // We now apply the findCenter function 63 times to get // the location of the centers of all 63 constructed circles. // The complicated array setup ensures that all the circles // will be taken in the right order for(int i = 0;i<=5;i=i+1) { int skip = trav[i]; for(int k=skip;k<=64 - skip; k = k + 2*skip) { pair cent1 = coord[k-skip], cent2 = coord[k+skip]; real r1 = cent1.y, r2 = cent2.y, rn=r1*r2/((sqrt(r1)+sqrt(r2))^2); real shiftx = cent1.x + sqrt(4*r1*rn); coord[k] = (shiftx,rn); } // Draw the remaining 63 circles } for(int i=1;i<=63;i=i+1) { filldraw(circle(coord[i],coord[i].y),gray(0.75)); }[/asy]$

$\textbf{(A)}\ \frac{286}{35} \qquad\textbf{(B)}\ \frac{583}{70} \qquad\textbf{(C)}\ \frac{715}{73} \qquad\textbf{(D)}}\ \frac{143}{14} \qquad\textbf{(E)}\ \frac{1573}{146}$ (Error compiling LaTeX. Unknown error_msg)

2015 AMC 12A (Problems • Answer Key • Resources)
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2015 AMC 12A Problems/Problem 25

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