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Geometry Level 3

How many points are there on the globe where by walking one mile south, one mile east and one mile north you reach the place where you started?

Assumptions-

Take the globe to be considerably large, like Earth.

Infinity 6400 1 2 0 540

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1 solution

Vatsalya Tandon
Jul 4, 2016

The north pole is one such place.

However consider the points 1 + 1 2 π 1+ \frac{1}{2\pi} away from the South Pole. Let any of those points be A and then go a mile south to a point B. When you go a mile east, you end up back at point B (you travelled once through every line of longitude). A mile north then brings you back to point A.

There are points still closer to the south pole such that going a mile east brings you through each line of longitude exactly twice, three times, or as many times as you want. Thus we have an infinite \text{infinite} number of concentric rings of i n f i n i t e infinite numbers of points, and we can start a mile north of any of them.

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