A man owns a rectangular plot of land with corners labeled , with meters and meters. He walks in a very peculiar fashion. He starts at and walks to . Then, he walks to the midpoint of side (labeled ). Then, he walks to the midpoint of side (labeled ), and then the midpoint of (labeled ). He continues in this fashion indefinitely. The total length of his path is of the form , where and are positive integers, and is not divisible by the square of any prime. What is the value of ?
This problem is posed by Muhammad A.
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The length of AC is 13 (by the Pythagorean theorem). The length of C A 1 is 6 1 . The following lengths are 13/2, 2 6 1 , and so on, with each term exactly 1/2 of the term two before it, starting with the 3rd term
Thus, we are calculating two infinite series with a 1 equal to 13 and 6 1 , respectively and common ratio 1/2 for each. The answer is equal to 26 + 2 6 1 and a + b + c = 26 + 2 + 61 = 8 9