CTK Exchange
CTK Wiki Math
Front Page
Movie shortcuts
Personal info
Awards
Terms of use
Privacy Policy

Interactive Activities

Cut The Knot!
MSET99 Talk
Games & Puzzles
Arithmetic/Algebra
Geometry
Probability
Eye Opener
Analog Gadgets
Inventor's Paradox
Did you know?...
Proofs
Math as Language
Things Impossible
My Logo
Math Poll
Other Math sit's
Guest book
News sit's

Recommend this site

Manifesto: what CTK is about Search CTK Buying a book is a commitment to learning Table of content Products to download and subscription Things you can find on CTK Chronology of updates Email to Cut The Knot Recommend this page

CTK Exchange

Subject: "Regular Polygon problem"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
Printer-friendly copy     Email this topic to a friend    
Conferences The CTK Exchange College math Topic #746
Reading Topic #746
Jeremy Dunn
guest
Jan-17-11, 11:48 PM (EST)
 
"Regular Polygon problem"
 
   In doing some experimental drawing in AutoCAD I ran across what appear to be some interesting relations that appear to be true but which I am unable to prove regarding regular polygons. First, draw a regular polygon of 5 or more sides. Now pick a vertex and draw all rays going from that vertex to all of the other vertices, this divides the polygon into a series of triangles. The following seems to be true:

1. A circle passes through the incenters of all the triangles.
2. A circle passes through the centroids of all the triangles.
3. If you draw the incircles inside all of the triangles a circle can be drawn tangent to the outside of all of them and tangent to the circle passing through the vertices of the polygon.

So my basic questions are

1. Are these relations true or just very close on my CAD system?
2. If true what are the formulas to calculate the radii of these circles?
3. How does one locate the centers of these circles?

I suggest that it would be helpful to express distances in terms of setting the circumradius of the polygon equal to 1.

Easy to state, much harder to solve! I suspect there are some interesting relations to be found here.


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
alexbadmin
Charter Member
2716 posts
Jan-18-11, 01:54 PM (EST)
Click to EMail alexb Click to send private message to alexb Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
1. "RE: Regular Polygon problem"
In response to message #0
 
   Jeremy, I put together an applet just to verify the claims:

https://www.cut-the-knot.org/Curriculum/Geometry/CirclesInRegularPolygon.shtml

Have not thought of this yet. The first impression is that, while 2 and 3 are probably true, 1 may not be, although, of course, it all may be appearnces within the possible error range.

Need to think of that. Thank you for bringing this up.


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
alexbadmin
Charter Member
2716 posts
Jan-20-11, 08:44 AM (EST)
Click to EMail alexb Click to send private message to alexb Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
2. "RE: Regular Polygon problem"
In response to message #1
 
   Now, the centroids are definitely concyclic. To see that, observe that the midpoints of the sides of a regular polygon are concylic - they all lie on the incircle of the polygon. Now, choose a vertex and shrink the whole picture towards it with the coefficient of 2/3 - this is called homothety, or a similarity transform. The midpoints will map on the centroids but a circle will remain a circle.

This also shows that the circle through the centroids is tangent to the two sides making the selected vertex.


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Conferences | Forums | Topics | Previous Topic | Next Topic

You may be curious to have a look at the old CTK Exchange archive.
Please do not post there.

Copyright © 1996-2018 Alexander Bogomolny

Search:
Keywords:

Google
Web CTK