# Tag Archives: similarity

## Mistakes are Good

Confession #1:  My answers on my last post were WRONG.

I briefly thought about taking that post down, but discarded that idea when I thought about the reality that almost all published mathematics is polished, cleaned, and optimized.  Many students struggle with mathematics under the misconception that their first attempts at any topic should be as polished as what they read in published sources.

While not precisely from the same perspective, Dan Teague recently wrote an excellent, short piece of advice to new teachers on NCTM’s ‘blog entitled Demonstrating Competence by Making Mistakes.  I argue Dan’s advice actually applies to all teachers, so in the spirit of showing how to stick with a problem and not just walking away saying “I was wrong”, I’m going to keep my original post up, add an advisory note at the start about the error, and show below how I corrected my error.

Confession #2:  My approach was a much longer and far less elegant solution than the identical approaches offered by a comment by “P” on my last post and the solution offered on FiveThirtyEight.  Rather than just accepting the alternative solution, as too many students are wont to do, I acknowledged the more efficient approach of others before proceeding to find a way to get the answer through my initial idea.

I’ll also admit that I didn’t immediately see the simple approach to the answer and rushed my post in the time I had available to get it up before the answer went live on FiveThirtyEight.

GENERAL STRATEGY and GOALS:

1-Use a PDF:  The original FiveThirtyEight post asked for the expected time before the siblings simultaneously finished their tasks.  I interpreted this as expected value, and I knew how to compute the expected value of a pdf of a random variable.  All I needed was the potential wait times, t, and their corresponding probabilities.  My approach was solid, but a few of my computations were off.

2-Use Self-Similarity:  I don’t see many people employing the self-similarity tactic I used in my initial solution.  Resolving my initial solution would allow me to continue using what I consider a pretty elegant strategy for handling cumbersome infinite sums.

A CORRECTED SOLUTION:

Stage 1:  My table for the distribution of initial choices was correct, as were my conclusions about the probability and expected time if they chose the same initial app.

My first mistake was in my calculation of the expected time if they did not choose the same initial app.  The 20 numbers in blue above represent that sample space.  Notice that there are 8 times where one sibling chose a 5-minute app, leaving 6 other times where one sibling chose a 4-minute app while the other chose something shorter.  Similarly, there are 4 choices of an at most 3-minute app, and 2 choices of an at most 2-minute app.  So the expected length of time spent by the longer app if the same was not chosen for both is

$E(Round1) = \frac{1}{20}*(8*5+6*4+4*3+2*2)=4$ minutes,

a notably longer time than I initially reported.

For the initial app choice, there is a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance they choose the same app for an average time of 3 minutes, and a $\frac{4}{5}$ chance they choose different apps for an average time of 4 minutes.

Stage 2:  My biggest error was a rushed assumption that all of the entries I gave in the Round 2 table were equally likely.  That is clearly false as you can see from Table 1 above.  There are only two instances of a time difference of 4, while there are eight instances of a time difference of 1.  A correct solution using my approach needs to account for these varied probabilities.  Here is a revised version of Table 2 with these probabilities included.

Conveniently–as I had noted without full realization in my last post–the revised Table 2 still shows the distribution for the 2nd and all future potential rounds until the siblings finally align, including the probabilities.  This proved to be a critical feature of the problem.

Another oversight was not fully recognizing which events would contribute to increasing the time before parity.  The yellow highlighted cells in Table 2 are those for which the next app choice was longer than the current time difference, and any of these would increase the length of a trial.

I was initially correct in concluding there was a $\frac{1}{5}$ probability of the second app choice achieving a simultaneous finish and that this would not result in any additional total time.  I missed the fact that the six non-highlighted values also did not result in additional time and that there was a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance of this happening.

That leaves a $\frac{3}{5}$ chance of the trial time extending by selecting one of the highlighted events.  If that happens, the expected time the trial would continue is

$\displaystyle \frac{4*4+(4+3)*3+(4+3+2)*2+(4+3+2+1)*1}{4+(4+3)+(4+3+2)+(4+3+2+1)}=\frac{13}{6}$ minutes.

Iterating:  So now I recognized there were 3 potential outcomes at Stage 2–a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance of matching and ending, a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance of not matching but not adding time, and a $\frac{3}{5}$ chance of not matching and adding an average $\frac{13}{6}$ minutes.  Conveniently, the last two possibilities still combined to recreate perfectly the outcomes and probabilities of the original Stage 2, creating a self-similar, pseudo-fractal situation.  Here’s the revised flowchart for time.

Invoking the similarity, if there were T minutes remaining after arriving at Stage 2, then there was a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance of adding 0 minutes, a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance of remaining at T minutes, and a $\frac{3}{5}$ chance of adding $\frac{13}{6}$ minutes–that is being at $T+\frac{13}{6}$ minutes.  Equating all of this allows me to solve for T.

$T=\frac{1}{5}*0+\frac{1}{5}*T+\frac{3}{5}*\left( T+\frac{13}{6} \right) \longrightarrow T=6.5$ minutes

Time Solution:  As noted above, at the start, there was a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance of immediately matching with an average 3 minutes, and there was a $\frac{4}{5}$ chance of not matching while using an average 4 minutes.  I just showed that from this latter stage, one would expect to need to use an additional mean 6.5 minutes for the siblings to end simultaneously, for a mean total of 10.5 minutes.  That means the overall expected time spent is

Total Expected Time $=\frac{1}{5}*3 + \frac{4}{5}*10.5 = 9$ minutes.

Number of Rounds Solution:  My initial computation of the number of rounds was actually correct–despite the comment from “P” in my last post–but I think the explanation could have been clearer.  I’ll try again.

One round is obviously required for the first choice, and in the $\frac{4}{5}$ chance the siblings don’t match, let N be the average number of rounds remaining.  In Stage 2, there’s a $\frac{1}{5}$ chance the trial will end with the next choice, and a $\frac{4}{5}$ chance there will still be N rounds remaining.  This second situation is correct because both the no time added and time added possibilities combine to reset Table 2 with a combined probability of $\frac{4}{5}$.  As before, I invoke self-similarity to find N.

$N = \frac{1}{5}*1 + \frac{4}{5}*N \longrightarrow N=5$

Therefore, the expected number of rounds is $\frac{1}{5}*1 + \frac{4}{5}*5 = 4.2$ rounds.

It would be cool if someone could confirm this prediction by simulation.

CONCLUSION:

I corrected my work and found the exact solution proposed by others and simulated by Steve!   Even better, I have shown my approach works and, while notably less elegant, one could solve this expected value problem by invoking the definition of expected value.

Best of all, I learned from a mistake and didn’t give up on a problem.  Now that’s the real lesson I hope all of my students get.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Most of my thinking about teaching lately has been about the priceless, timeless value of process in problem solving over the ephemeral worth of answers.  While an answer to a problem puts a period at the end of a sentence, the beauty and worth of the sentence was the construction, word choice, and elegance employed in sharing the idea at the heart of the sentence.

Just as there are many ways to craft a sentence–from cumbersome plodding to poetic imagery–there are equally many ways to solve problems in mathematics.  Just as great writing reaches, explores, and surprises, great problem solving often starts with the solver not really knowing where the story will lead, taking different paths depending on the experience of the solver, and ending with even more questions.

I experienced that yesterday reading through tweets from one of my favorite middle and upper school problem sources, Five Triangles.  The valuable part of what follows is, in my opinion, the multiple paths I tried before settling on something productive.  My hope is that students learn the value in exploration, even when initially unproductive.

At the end of this post, I offer a few variations on the problem.

The Problem

Try this for yourself before reading further.  I’d LOVE to hear others’ approaches.

First Thoughts and Inherent Variability

My teaching career has been steeped in transformations, and I’ve been playing with origami lately, so my brain immediately translated the setup:

Fold vertex A of equilateral triangle ABC onto side BC.  Let segment DE be the resulting crease with endpoints on sides AB and AC with measurements as given above.

So DF is the folding image of AD and EF is the folding image of AE.  That is, ADFE is a kite and segment DE is a perpendicular bisector of (undrawn) segment AF.  That gave $\Delta ADE \cong \Delta FDE$ .

I also knew that there were lots of possible locations for point F, even though this set-up chose the specific orientation defined by BF=3.

Lovely, but what could I do with all of that?

Trigonometry Solution Eventually Leads to Simpler Insights

Because FD=7, I knew AD=7.  Combining this with the given DB=8 gave AB=15, so now I knew the side of the original equilateral triangle and could quickly compute its perimeter or area if needed.  Because BF=3, I got FC=12.

At this point, I had thoughts of employing Heron’s Formula to connect the side lengths of a triangle with its area.  I let AE=x, making EF=x and $EC=15-x$.  With all of the sides of $\Delta EFC$ defined, its perimeter was 27, and I could use Heron’s Formula to define its area:

$Area(\Delta EFC) = \sqrt{13.5(1.5)(13.5-x)(x-1.5)}$

But I didn’t know the exact area, so that was a dead end.

Since $\Delta ABC$ is equilateral, $m \angle C=60^{\circ}$ , I then thought about expressing the area using trigonometry.  With trig, the area of a triangle is half the product of any two sides multiplied by the sine of the contained angle.  That meant $Area(\Delta EFC) = \frac{1}{2} \cdot 12 \cdot (15-x) \cdot sin(60^{\circ}) = 3(15-x) \sqrt3$.

Now I had two expressions for the same area, so I could solve for x.

$3\sqrt{3}(15-x) = \sqrt{13.5(1.5)(13.5-x)(x-1.5)}$

Squaring both sides revealed a quadratic in x.  I could do this algebra, if necessary, but this was clearly a CAS moment.

I had two solutions, but this felt WAY too complicated.  Also, Five Triangles problems are generally accessible to middle school students.  The trigonometric form of a triangle’s area is not standard middle school fare.  There had to be an easier way.

A Quicker Ending

Thinking trig opened me up to angle measures.  If I let $m \angle CEF = \theta$, then $m \angle EFC = 120^{\circ}-\theta$, making $m \angle DFB = \theta$, and I suddenly had my simple breakthrough!  Because their angles were congruent, I knew $\Delta CEF \sim \Delta BFD$.

Because the triangles were similar, I could employ similarity ratios.

$\frac{7}{8}=\frac{x}{12}$
$x=10.5$

And that is one of the CAS solutions by a MUCH SIMPLER approach.

Extensions and Variations

Following are five variations on the original Five Triangles problem.  What other possible variations can you find?

1)  Why did the CAS give two solutions?  Because $\Delta BDF$ had all three sides explicitly given, by SSS there should be only one solution.  So is the 13.0714 solution real or extraneous?  Can you prove your claim?  If that solution is extraneous, identify the moment when the solution became “real”.

2)  Eliminating the initial condition that BF=3 gives another possibility.  Using only the remaining information, how long is $\overline{BF}$ ?

$\Delta BDF$ now has SSA information, making it an ambiguous case situation.  Let BF=x and invoke the Law of Cosines.

$7^2=x^2+8^2-2 \cdot x \cdot 8 cos(60^{\circ})$
$49=x^2-8x+64$
$0=(x-3)(x-5)$

Giving the original BF=3 solution and a second possible answer:  BF=5.

3)  You could also stay with the original problem asking for AE.

From above, the solution for BF=3 is AE=10.5.  But if BF=5 from the ambiguous case, then FC=10 and the similarity ratio above becomes

$\frac{7}{8}=\frac{x}{10}$
$x=\frac{35}{4}=8.75$

4)  Under what conditions is $\overline{DE} \parallel \overline{BC}$ ?

5)  Consider all possible locations of folding point A onto $\overline{BC}$.  What are all possible lengths of $\overline{DE}$?

## Finding area

I follow the Five Triangles ‘blog for cool math problems.  A recent one proved particularly nice.

At first I wasn’t sure this situation was invariant.  I didn’t see how fixing three triangle areas guaranteed a fixed quadrilateral area.  Not seeing an immediate general solution approach, I reasoned that if there was a solution, it worked for multiple overall configurations.  If it worked in general, then it must also work for any particular case I chose, so I made the cevians perpendicular.  That made each of the given area triangles right.  I modeled that by constructing the overall triangle with the cevian intersection at the origin and the legs of the given area triangles along the coordinate axes.

There are many ways to do this, but I reasoned that if there was a single answer, then any one of them would work.  A right triangle with legs of length 8 and 5 would have area 20.  Constructing that triangle in GeoGebra fixed the lengths of the legs of the other two triangles and the hypotenuses of the area 8 & 15 triangles intersected at a Quadrant II point.  Here’s my construction.

I  overlayed a polygon to create the quadrilateral and measured its area directly.  For fun, I also wrote algebraic equations for lines CB and DA, found the coordinates of point F by solving the 2×2 linear system, used that to derive the area of $\Delta BDF$, and determined the area of the quadrilateral from that.

While I realized that this approach was just a single case of the given problem, it absolutely convinced me that the solution was unique.  Once the area 20 triangle was defined (whether or not the triangle was right), a side and the area of each of the other two given triangles is known.  That meant the heights of the triangles would be determined and thereby the location of the quadrilateral’s fourth vertex.  So, I knew without a doubt that the unknown area was $27 cm^2$, but I didn’t know a general solution.

Chronology of the General Solution

While I worked more on the problem, I also pitched it to my Twitter network and asked a colleague at my school, Tatiana Yudovina, if she was interested in the problem.  Next is Tatiana’s initial solution, followed by my generic Geogebra construction, and a much shorter solution Tatiana created.  My conclusion takes the problem to a more generic state and raises some potential extensions.

Tatiana’s First Solution:

Leveraging the fact that triangles with the same base have equivalent height and area ratios, she created a system of equations that solved to eventually determine the quadrilateral’s area.

My Generic GeoGebra Solution:

While Tatiana was working on her algebraic answer, I was creating  a dynamic version on GeoGebra.  I built the area 20 triangle by first drawing a segment AB and measuring its length, a.  That meant the height of this triangle, h, was given by $\frac{1}{2} a \cdot h =20\longrightarrow h=\frac{40}{a}$. Then I constructed a perpendicular line to AB and used the “Segment with Fixed Length” tool and defined the length using the generic length of h as defined above to create segment AC.  This worked because GeoGebra defined the length of AB as a variable as shown below.

I used the “Compass” tool to create a circle with radius AC through the perpendicular line created earlier. Point D is the intersection of the circle and the normal line.  I then constructed a perpendicular to AD through D and placed a random point E on this new line.  Point E was the requisite height above AB to guarantee that $\Delta ABE$ always had area 20 which I confirmed by drawing the triangle and computing its area.

I hid AC, the circle, and both normals.  Segment AB was a completely independent object, and point E was free to move along the second “height” normal.  I measured AE and repeated the previous construction to create the area 15 triangle. Because BE was part of a cevian, I drew line BE to determine point J on the normal defining the final vertex of the area 15 triangle.

Again, I hid all of my constructions and repeated the process to create the final vertex, K, of the area 8 triangle off side BE of the area 20 triangle.  Extending segments AJ and BK defined point L, the final vertex of the quadrilateral.  Laying a quadrilateral in the figure let me compute its area.  Moving points A, B, and E around the screen and seeing the areas remain fixed is pretty compelling evidence that the quadrilateral’s area is always 27, and Tatiana’s proof showed why.  You can play with my final construction on GeoGebra Tube here.

Then Tatiana emailed me a much shorter proof.

Tatiana’s Short Solution:

Reversing the logic of her first solution, Tatiana reasoned that equivalent-altitude triangles had equal base and area ratios.

And the sum of X and Y gave the quadrilateral’s area.

Conclusion:

This problem was entertaining both in the solution and the multiple ways we found it.  Creating the dynamic construction gave  insights into the critical features of the problem.

Here are some potential extensions I developed for this problem.  I haven’t fully explored any of them yet, hoping some of my geometry students this year might take up the exploration challenge.  I’d love to hear if any of my readers have any further suggestions.

1. It might be interesting to create an even more dynamic construction with the areas of the three given triangles defined by sliders.
2. Can the quadrilateral’s area be expressed as a closed-form function of the areas of the three given triangles.
3. What happens on the boundaries of this problem?  That is, what happens if one of the side triangles was a degenerate with area 0? What would happen to the quadrilateral? Would would be the corresponding affect on the area formula from extension 2?
4. Extending 3 even further, if both given side triangles were degenerates with area 0, it seems that the area formula from extension 2 should collapse to the area of the final given non-zero triangle, but does it?

Thanks again, Five Triangles, for another great problem!

## Quadrilateral surprise … or not?

The first time I recall encountering this problem was about 10-15 years ago when I was reading David Wells’ Curious and Interesting Geometry.  Not having taught geometry for several years, I’d forgotten about it until I encountered it again last week in Paul Lockhart’s Measurement.

My statement of the problem:

Draw any quadrilateral with non-intersecting sides.  Place a point at the midpoint of each side.  Connect the four midpoints in clockwise order.  1) What shape does the resulting quadrilateral always assume?  2) How does the area of the new quadrilateral compare to the area of the original quadrilateral?  Of course, you need to prove thy claims.

Draw several different quadrilaterals in your investigation.  So long as the sides don’t overlap, nothing else matters.  The pattern will emerge.  I love the stunning and unexpected emergence of order.

Don’t read any further until you’ve played with this for yourself.  The joy of mathematical discovery is worth it!  Above all, give yourself and your students lots of time to explore.  Don’t be too quick to offer suggestions.

I suggest using TI-nSpire, Geogebra, Geometer’s Sketchpad, or some other dynamic geometry software to model this.  Using my TI, I was able to quickly explore an entire spectrum of results.  Following are two representative images.

No matter what type of non-overlapping quadrilateral you draw, a parallelogram always seems to emerge.  I thought a while through various approaches to discover an elegant way to prove this, and in the process discovered the area solution.  Find your own proof before reading further.