It's a beautiful Saturday morning. The wind is light yet refreshing, the sun warm and mellow, and the Trevor is riding Jake piggyback upon the verdant turf of the first golf course.
Starting at , Trevor tells his serf to advance north by meter and turn clockwise. Jake, with his incredibly exact eyesight, does just that. At each nth step, he walks meter and turns clockwise.
What is the displacement in meters Trevor and Jake have travelled from the origin? If it can be expressed in the form , where and are positive integers, what is ?
This section requires Javascript.
You are seeing this because something didn't load right. We suggest you, (a) try
refreshing the page, (b) enabling javascript if it is disabled on your browser and,
finally, (c)
loading the
non-javascript version of this page
. We're sorry about the hassle.
First, define a "step" as one north-east-south-west travel done successively. It is obvious that travelling north/south increases/decreases y -coordinate and travelling east/west increases/decreases x -coordinate.
Let the symbol → denote the transition from one step to the other and ( a , b ) → ( c , d ) means that Trev-Jake displaced from ( a , b ) to ( c , d ) after a step. From the given data, we have,
( 0 , 0 ) → ( 2 1 − 4 1 , 1 − 3 1 ) → ( 2 1 − 4 1 + 6 1 − 8 1 , 1 − 3 1 + 5 1 − 7 1 ) → …
As the steps continue ad infinitum, the limiting displacement point can be given as,
( X , Y ) = ( n = 0 ∑ ∞ 2 ( n + 1 ) ( − 1 ) n , n = 0 ∑ ∞ 2 n + 1 ( − 1 ) n )
We need to compute X and Y . Now, by the Maclaurin series of arctan ( x ) and ln ( 1 + x ) , we can obtain that,
X = n = 0 ∑ ∞ 2 ( n + 1 ) ( − 1 ) n = 2 1 n = 0 ∑ ∞ n + 1 ( − 1 ) n = 2 1 ln ( 1 + 1 ) = 2 1 ln 2 Y = n = 0 ∑ ∞ 2 n + 1 ( − 1 ) n = arctan ( 1 ) = 4 π
Using the distance formula, we can easily find the displacement as follows:
Displacement ( s ) = ( X − 0 ) 2 + ( Y − 0 ) 2 = X 2 + Y 2 = 4 1 ln 2 2 + 1 6 π 2 = 2 1 ln 2 2 + 4 π 2
Comparing values with the given form in question gives us the answer as 2 + 4 = 6 .