Triangle in Star

Geometry Level 5

If the inner pentagon of a regular star polygon has unit sides, find the length of the side s s of the largest equilateral triangle that can fit inside the star without overlapping its sides.

Give your answer as 1000 s \lfloor 1000s \rfloor .


The answer is 2054.

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1 solution

Chris Lewis
Dec 7, 2018

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 s=AB by using the sine rule twice.

In Δ A P Q \Delta APQ :

P Q = φ A P Q = 3 6 Q A P = 12 0 P Q A = 2 4 \begin{aligned} PQ &= \varphi \\ \angle APQ &= 36^{\circ} \\ \angle QAP &= 120^{\circ} \\ \angle PQA &= 24^{\circ} \end{aligned}

where φ = 1 + 5 2 \varphi=\frac{1+\sqrt5}{2} is the golden ratio.

The sine rule gives A Q = φ sin 36 sin 120 AQ=\frac{\varphi\sin{36}}{\sin{120}}

In Δ B Q R \Delta BQR :

Q R = φ B Q R = 180 P Q A P Q R = 180 24 108 = 4 8 Q R B = 3 6 R B Q = 9 6 \begin{aligned} QR &= \varphi \\ \angle BQR &= 180-\angle PQA - \angle PQR = 180-24-108=48^{\circ} \\ \angle QRB &= 36^{\circ} \\ \angle RBQ &= 96^{\circ} \end{aligned}

So Q B = φ sin 36 s i n 96 QB=\frac{\varphi \sin{36}}{sin{96}}

We then have s = A B = A Q + Q B = 2.054 s=AB=AQ+QB=2.054\ldots

The trig functions involved can actually be expressed in radicals; this comes out as

s = 5 + 5 + 5 2 3 ( 5 + 5 ) 4 \begin{aligned} s&=\frac{-5+\sqrt5+5\sqrt{\frac{2}{3}\left(5+\sqrt5 \right)}}{4} \end{aligned}

Either way, the answer is 1000 s = 2054 \lfloor 1000s \rfloor=\boxed{2054} .

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?

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

Gerard Boileau - 2 years, 5 months ago

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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 Q is one of the five vertices of this pentagon. P Q = φ = 1 + 5 2 = 1.618 PQ=\varphi=\frac{1+\sqrt5}{2}=1.618\ldots . If you scale up your solution by this factor, you get A B = 1.269 × 1.618 = 2.05 AB=1.269\times1.618=2.05\ldots . Hope that clears things up!

Chris Lewis - 2 years, 5 months ago

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Thanks, you're right, I missed the words "inner pentagon". Sorry...

Gerard Boileau - 2 years, 5 months ago

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