English

Synthetic foundations of cevian geometry, I: Fixed points of affine maps in triangle geometry

General Mathematics 2017-11-28 v1

Abstract

We give synthetic proofs of many new results in triangle geometry, focusing especially on fixed points of certain affine maps which are defined in terms of the cevian triangle DEFDEF of a point PP with respect to a given triangle ABCABC, as well as the cevian triangle of the isotomic conjugate PP' of PP with respect to ABCABC. We prove a formula for the cyclocevian map in terms of the isotomic and isogonal maps using an entirely synthetic argument, and show that the complement QQ of the isotomic conjugate PP' has many interesting properties. If TPT_P is the affine map taking ABCABC to DEFDEF, we show synthetically that QQ is the unique ordinary fixed point of TPT_P when PP is any point not lying on the sides of triangle ABCABC, its anti-complementary triangle, or the Steiner circumellipse of ABCABC. We also show that TP(Q)=PT_P(Q')=P if QQ' is the complement of PP, and that the affine map TPTPT_P T_{P'} is either a homothety or a translation which always has the PP-ceva conjugate of QQ as a fixed point. Finally, we show that PP lies on the Steiner circumellipse if and only if TPTP=K1T_PT_{P'}=K^{-1}, where KK is the complement map for ABCABC. This paper forms the foundation for several more papers to follow, in which the conic on the 5 points A,B,C,P,QA,B,C,P,Q is studied and its center is characterized as a fixed point of the map λ=TPTP1\lambda=T_{P'} T_P^{-1}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1504.00210,
  title  = {Synthetic foundations of cevian geometry, I: Fixed points of affine maps in triangle geometry},
  author = {Igor Minevich and Patrick Morton},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1504.00210},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

25 pages, 6 figures