The previous post is “Analytic (coordinate) geometry has its good points, but elegance is not one of them”, in which a formula for any line cutting a triangle in half was found. The envelope of the cutting line for one section (of three) of the triangle was found to be always a hyperbola, which got me thinking “How do I get an ellipse?”. Clearly not by cutting a triangle in half, which involved taking two points A’ and B’on adjacent sides of the triangle, and making the product of their distances from the point of intersection of the sides equal to half the product of the lengths of the two sides.
So we cannot take two distances along two lines from the same point, lets try two distances from separate points on two lines, and keep the product of the distances constant. Magic:
The base line is AF. Line DL is set parallel to AF. B and G are the two points of interest, where AB and DG are the two distances, and the envelope of the line BG is an ellipse which touches AF and DL. The really interesting thing about this is that the lines do not have to be parallel, and that as the points A and F are placed nearer and nearer to the point of intersection the ellipse becomes more and more hyperbolic at the nearby end.
The next post will be a different follow-up to the triangle halving.
Constructions made with GEOSTRUCT, an online browser application:
To get geostruct from the net click
and to download the .doc instructions file