If the inner pentagon of a regular star polygon has unit sides, find the length of the side s of the largest equilateral triangle that can fit inside the star without overlapping its sides.
Give your answer as ⌊ 1 0 0 0 s ⌋ .
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Hello ! when trying to draw this picture with Geogebra, I get a length of 1.269 for the triangle side (as the star has unit sides). Considering the picture shown in the answer, it seems strange that the length of side AB could be above 2, if PQ = 1. Am I wrong somewhere ? Thanks
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The question says "the inner pentagon" has unit sides - I haven't actually marked this in my diagram, but if it helps Q is one of the five vertices of this pentagon. P Q = φ = 2 1 + 5 = 1 . 6 1 8 … . If you scale up your solution by this factor, you get A B = 1 . 2 6 9 × 1 . 6 1 8 = 2 . 0 5 … . Hope that clears things up!
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Thanks, you're right, I missed the words "inner pentagon". Sorry...
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Please note this solution is incomplete - I have no way to prove that this is the largest triangle.
After much playing around with this, the largest triangle I found was in the following configuration:
We can work out the edge length of the triangle s = A B by using the sine rule twice.
In Δ A P Q :
P Q ∠ A P Q ∠ Q A P ∠ P Q A = φ = 3 6 ∘ = 1 2 0 ∘ = 2 4 ∘
where φ = 2 1 + 5 is the golden ratio.
The sine rule gives A Q = sin 1 2 0 φ sin 3 6
In Δ B Q R :
Q R ∠ B Q R ∠ Q R B ∠ R B Q = φ = 1 8 0 − ∠ P Q A − ∠ P Q R = 1 8 0 − 2 4 − 1 0 8 = 4 8 ∘ = 3 6 ∘ = 9 6 ∘
So Q B = s i n 9 6 φ sin 3 6
We then have s = A B = A Q + Q B = 2 . 0 5 4 …
The trig functions involved can actually be expressed in radicals; this comes out as
s = 4 − 5 + 5 + 5 3 2 ( 5 + 5 )
Either way, the answer is ⌊ 1 0 0 0 s ⌋ = 2 0 5 4 .
However, as I mentioned above, this does not prove that the triangle is the largest possible (OK, the answer was accepted as correct, but that doesn't really count as a proof!). The only ideas I had were to use numerical methods, but I'm not sure any of these would easily give the required accuracy. Can anyone prove it?