Generator

An angle standing on a chord

A generator in the geometry library, called 114 times across 21 essays. Below: what it draws with nothing chosen and at each mode an essay asks for, what it checks while drawing, and everywhere it is used.

circle-angle is one function. Everything below came out of it during this build, at parameters taken from the essays rather than invented for this page — so a figure here is the same figure a reader meets in an essay, and if the generator changes, this page changes with it.

With nothing chosen

An angle standing on a chord. A circle with a fixed chord and a movable apex on the major arc. The angle at the apex is 60 degrees wherever the apex is put, and the angle the same chord subtends at the centre is 120 degrees.

The classical centres as three weights each

The classical centres as three weights each. A table of triangle centres with the weights on the three corners that produce each, and the determinants that decide which triples of them are collinear.

Three centres that always fall on one line

Three centres that always fall on one line. A triangle with its circumcentre, centroid and orthocentre marked; the three are collinear and the centroid divides the segment between the outer two in the ratio one to two.

The nine-point circle, touching four others

The nine-point circle, touching four others. A triangle with its nine-point circle, its inscribed circle and its three escribed circles, each of the four tangent to the first — with the distances between centres compared against the radii.

A quadrilateral inscribed in a circle

A quadrilateral inscribed in a circle. Four points on a circle. Opposite angles are 93° and 87°, and 90° and 90° — each pair adding to 180°.

Four apexes, one angle

Four apexes, one angle. The same chord seen from four different points of the major arc. All four angles are 60 degrees.

What it checks while it draws

Collected by running the family and recording what it asserted, not written here. The count is how many separate times the claim was put to the test while these drawings were made.

Where it is called

Every figure on this list is drawn by the same rule, so a change to the rule changes all of them at once. That is why the list is published.

Geometry

A centre is three weights

Write each classical centre as a weighted average of the corners and a coincidence becomes a determinant. The Euler line is then one number rather than a construction, the whole catalogue becomes mechanical, and the reason one centre is missing from it is visible in the weights.

Geometry

A chain of tetrahedra saves more

In the plane, junctions never seem to shorten a network of roads by more than the equilateral triangle's 13.4%. In space the regular tetrahedron allows 18.7%, and the obvious guess — that it is the worst case, as the triangle is in the plane — is wrong. Points spaced along a chain of tetrahedra glued face to face do better with every point added: 20.5% at twelve, 21.4% at sixty, and about 21.6% in the limit. Random points come nowhere near, and a search that only goes downhill does not find the chain.

Geometry

A total hung in a temple

Put a polygon's corners on a circle, cut it into triangles, and add up the radii of the circles inscribed in the triangles. Cut it a different way and the total is the same — for all fourteen ways of cutting a hexagon, to every digit. The fact was painted on a wooden tablet in a Japanese temple around 1800, and the reason for it is a theorem about one triangle and the distances from its circumcentre to its sides.

Geometry

A triangle that fits once fits everywhere

Put one circle inside another and try to fit a triangle between them, its corners on the outer circle and its sides touching the inner. Usually no triangle fits. But if one does, then one fits starting from every point of the outer circle — and whether it does is decided by a single equation in the two radii and the distance between the centres.

Geometry

An angle that does not care where it stands

Fix two points on a circle and look at them from anywhere else on the far arc. The angle is the same from every one of those places, and it is exactly half the angle at the centre.

Geometry

Eighteen equilateral triangles

Every angle of a triangle has three trisectors, not one, once the angle and its outside are both counted. Choosing one at each corner gives twenty-seven ways to cut out a triangle, and eighteen of them give an equilateral one. The nine that fail are exactly the choices whose labels add to 2, 5 or 8 — and all eighteen equilateral triangles have their sides in the same three directions, fixed by a third of the difference between two angles.

Geometry

Every point has a partner across the bisectors

Draw the three lines from the corners of a triangle through any point, reflect each in the bisector of its own angle, and the three reflections meet again. The pairing this makes swaps the centroid with the symmedian point and the orthocentre with the circumcentre, bends every straight line into a conic through the corners, and sends the circumcircle to infinity.

Geometry

Every ray comes back to the other focus

An ellipse has two foci and one property everybody remembers: the distances to them add to a constant. What that property forces is stranger and more useful — a mirror shaped like an ellipse sends every ray leaving one focus, in every direction, through the other.

Geometry

Every side measured by one diameter

In any triangle, divide each side by the sine of the angle opposite it: the three answers are equal. That much is the law of sines, and it is usually left there. The common answer has a name — it is the diameter of the circle through the triangle's corners — and the reason is the inscribed angle once more. It is also why the sine was first a half-chord, why Ptolemy's theorem is the addition formula, and why a circle can hold infinitely many points all at rational distances from each other.

Geometry

How many pairs can be one apart

Place n points in the plane and count the pairs exactly one unit apart. A square grid with its spacing as the unit gives two pairs per point; the same grid with the unit chosen as a length it realises in many directions — the square root of 5, of 25, of 65, of 325 — gives three, five, eight. Counting points on circles caps the total at a constant times n to the four-thirds. Between that cap and the grids the truth has not moved since 1984, and at every size anyone can draw, the two look alike.

Geometry

Nine points on one circle

Three midpoints, three feet of altitudes and three more midpoints. Nine points defined in three unrelated ways, on an arbitrary triangle, and all nine sit on one circle — checked here on two hundred and forty triangles as well as on the drawn one.

Geometry

One circle touching four

The nine-point circle touches the inscribed circle and each of the three escribed ones. Nothing in its construction mentions them, the two families of centres are built from different kinds of number, and the tangency is four exact equalities between distances and radii.

Geometry

One number for every chord through a point

Draw any line through a point and let it cut a circle twice. The two distances from the point to the circle multiply to the same number whichever line is drawn — inside, outside, or grazing as a tangent. The number belongs to the point, and the reason it does not depend on the line is the inscribed angle: two chords through a point cut out two triangles with the same angles.

Geometry

Seven pieces and an equilateral middle

Morley's theorem has two proofs worth knowing, and they run in opposite directions. The trigonometric one starts from the triangle and computes each side of the inner one as 8R sin α sin β sin γ, symmetric in the three angles. Conway's starts from an equilateral triangle, builds six pieces round it from their angles alone, and shows they fit — so the triangle they make is whatever triangle was wanted, and its middle is equilateral because it was built that way.

Geometry

The point nearest in total to three corners

Three towns want one depot with the least total road to all of them. The answer is not the centroid or any of the classical centres: it is the point from which every side of the triangle is seen at 120°, found by building equilateral triangles on the sides. Three straight lines through it have the same length, and that length is the least total. When an angle of the triangle reaches 120°, the answer jumps to that corner — and the same 120° rule shapes soap films and the shortest networks joining many points.

Geometry

The sums a triangulation cannot change

The Japanese theorem says the inradii of any triangulation of a cyclic polygon add to the same total. Write the inradius as a sum of cosines of the angles, and the theorem becomes one case of a rule that fits in a line: a sum of f over every angle of every triangle ignores the triangulation exactly when f(x) + f(π − x) is constant. cos 3x qualifies, cos 2x does not, and the proof is the inscribed-angle theorem applied to a single flipped diagonal.

Geometry

The trisectors on a sphere almost agree

Draw Morley's construction on a sphere and the triangle the trisectors cut out is not equilateral — but its sides agree to within a tenth of a percent even when the angles add to 222°. Every step of the rotation proof survives on the sphere except one, and that one is the angle sum.

Geometry

Three circles that touch and are not the largest

In 1803 Gian Francesco Malfatti asked how to cut three round columns from a triangular block of marble with as little waste as possible, and answered with three circles each touching the other two and two sides. The circles exist in every triangle and are found by solving three equations. They are never the answer to his question: the plain greedy rule — the inscribed circle first, then the largest circle that still fits, twice — always does better, by 1.4 per cent on the equilateral triangle and by almost double on a thin one.

Geometry

Three trisectors and a triangle nobody expected

Cut every angle of a triangle into three. The trisectors nearest each side meet in three points, and those three points are always the corners of an equilateral triangle — for every triangle there is, with no exceptions and no reason anybody finds obvious.

Geometry

What a junction can save

Join a set of towns by roads that may meet only at towns, and the shortest such network is easy to find. Allow junctions anywhere and the network gets shorter — but never, it is conjectured, by more than 13.4%, the saving the Fermat point makes on an equilateral triangle. Computed exactly on 1,304 random sets of up to seven towns, the average saving is about 3%. An adversarial search drives it down to the bound and no further, and a hexagon with its centre attains it exactly. The proof of the bound that was accepted for twenty years has a gap.

Geometry

Wings that cut a chord equally

Take a chord of a circle and its midpoint. Draw any two more chords through the midpoint, join their ends crosswise, and the two crossing lines — the butterfly's wings — cut the first chord at equal distances from the middle. The proof is the inscribed angle and the power of a point working together; move the point off the middle and what survives is a law about reciprocals; replace the circle by any conic and the theorem does not notice.

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