Questions tagged [euclidean-geometry]
Euclidean geometry is a mathematical system attributed to the Alexandrian Greek mathematician Euclid, which he described in his textbook on geometry: the Elements. Euclid's method consists in assuming a small set of intuitively appealing axioms, and deducing many other propositions (theorems) from these.
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A curious relation between angles and lengths of edges of a tetrahedron
Consider a Euclidean tetrahedron with lengths of edges
$$
l_{12}, l_{13}, l_{14}, l_{23}, l_{24}, l_{34}
$$
and dihedral angles
$$
\alpha_{12}, \alpha_{13}, \alpha_{14},
\alpha_{23}, \alpha_{24}, \...
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Does this property characterize straight lines in the plane?
Take a plane curve $\gamma$ and a disk of fixed radius whose center moves along $\gamma$. Suppose that $\gamma$ always cuts the disk in two simply connected regions of equal area. Is it true that $\...
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If you break a stick at two points chosen uniformly, the probability the three resulting sticks form a triangle is 1/4. Is there a nice proof of this?
There is a standard problem in elementary probability that goes as follows. Consider a stick of length 1. Pick two points uniformly at random on the stick, and break the stick at those points. What ...
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Is Euclid dead?
Apparently Euclid died about 2,300 years ago (actually 2,288 to be more precise), but the title of the question refers to the rallying cry of Dieudonné, "A bas Euclide! Mort aux triangles!" (...
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Converse to Euclid's fifth postulate
There is a fascinating open problem in Riemannian Geometry which I would like to advertise here because I do not think that it is as well-known as it deserves to be. Euclid's famous fifth postulate, ...
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Geometric proof of the Vandermonde determinant?
The Vandermonde matrix is the $n\times n$ matrix whose $(i,j)$-th component is $x_j^{i-1}$, where the $x_j$ are indeterminates. It is well known that the determinant of this matrix is $$\prod_{1\leq ...
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Does this geometry theorem have a name?
Start with a circle and draw two tangent circles inside. The (black) inner tangent lines to the smaller circles intersect the large circle. The (red) lines through these intersection points are ...
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Probability that a stick randomly broken in five places can form a tetrahedron
Edit (June 2015): Addressing this problem is a brief project report from the Illinois Geometry Lab (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), dated May 2015, that appears here along with a foot-...
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Is orientability a miracle?
$\DeclareMathOperator\SO{SO}\DeclareMathOperator\O{O}$This question is prompted by a recent highly-upvoted question, Conceptual reason why the sign of a permutation is well-defined? The responses made ...
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Open problems in Euclidean geometry?
What are some (research level) open problems in Euclidean geometry ?
(Edit: I ask just out of curiosity, to understand how -and if- nowadays this is not a "dead" field yet)
I should clarify a bit ...
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Unusual symmetries of the Cayley-Menger determinant for the volume of tetrahedra
Suppose you have a tetrahedron $T$ in Euclidean space with edge lengths $\ell_{01}$, $\ell_{02}$, $\ell_{03}$, $\ell_{12}$, $\ell_{13}$, and $\ell_{23}$. Now consider the tetrahedron $T'$ with edge ...
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Automatically solving olympiad geometry problems
Warning: I am only an amateur in the foundations of mathematics.
My understanding of this Wikipedia page about Tarski's axiomatization of plane geometry (and especially the discussion about ...
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Can the fugitive escape?
A fugitive is surrounded by $N$ police officers, with the nearest one at distance $1$ away. The fugitive and the officers move alternatively.
In a fugitive move, the fugitive can travel no more than ...
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Sofa in a snaky 3D corridor
What is the largest volume object that can pass though a
$1 \times 1 \times L$ "snaky" corridor, where $L$ is large
enough to be irrelvant, say $L > 6$.
...
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Psychological test for Euclidean geometry [closed]
There is the so-called FCI test. It contains a list of questions such that anyone who can speak will have an opinion. Based on the answers one can determine if the answerer knows elementary mechanics. ...
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Which polygons can be turned inside out by a smooth deformation?
Take a non-degenerate polygon with side lengths $\{a_1,\dots,a_n\}$ in a convex configuration. What is the condition on the $a_i$'s so that the polygon can be turned inside out by a continuous motion ...
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Trigonometry / Euclidean Geometry for natural numbers?
Let $d(a,b) = 1 - \frac{2\gcd(a,b)^3}{ab(a+b)}$ be a metric on natural numbers without $0$.
The metric space $X = \{x_0,x_1,\cdots,x_n\},n>2$ is isometric embeddable in $\mathbb{R}^n$ if and only ...
user6671
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Open problems from antiquity solved with analytic geometry
E. T. Bell wrote in Men of Mathematics:
Though the idea behind it all is childishly simple, yet the method of analytic geometry is so powerful that very ordinary boys of seventeen can use it to prove
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About the ratio of the areas of a convex pentagon and the inner pentagon made by the five diagonals
Question : Letting $S{^\prime}$ be the area of the inner pentagon made by the five diagonals of a convex pentagon whose area is $S$, then find the max of $\frac{S^\prime}{S}$.
...
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Understanding sphere packing in higher dimensions
In a recent publication by the Ukrainian mathematician Maryna Viazovska the Kepler problem for dimension $8$ and $24$, namely the densest packing of spheres, was solved.
Admittedly it is very ...
user88381
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Can Morley's theorem be generalized?
Morley's theorem states that in any triangle, the three points of intersection of the adjacent angle trisectors form an equilateral triangle.
In a talk some years ago, David Rusin made the provocative ...
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Term for "uncheckable constructions"
Is there a term for "uncheckable geometric constructions"?
Say, Angle Trisection and Doubling the Cube are checkable;
i.e., if the answer is given one can do finite Compass-and-straightedge ...
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Euclid with Birkhoff
I'm looking for a short and elementary book which does Euclidean geometry with Birkhoff's axioms.
It would be best if it would also include some topics in projective (and/or) hyperbolic geometry.
...
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Why did Dedekind claim that $\sqrt{2}\cdot\sqrt{3}=\sqrt{6}$ hadn't been proved before?
In a letter to Lipschitz (1876) Dedekind doubts that $\sqrt{2}\cdot\sqrt{3}=\sqrt{6}$ had been proved before:
quoted from Leo Corry, Modern algebra, German original:
Why did Dedekind doubt that $(\...
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The lion and the zebras
The lion plays a deadly game against a group of $N$ zebras that takes place in the steppe (= an infinite plane). The lion starts in the origin with coordinates $(0,0)$, while the $N$ zebras may ...
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The Eyeball Theorem generalized
I have not seen the 2D Eyeball Theorem—that tangents from the centers of two circles, each encompassing the other, intersect each circle in the same segment length—generalized to higher ...
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Tetrahedra with prescribed face angles
I am looking for an analogue for the following 2 dimensional fact:
Given 3 angles $\alpha,\beta,\gamma\in (0;\pi)$ there is always a triangle with these prescribed angles. It is spherical/euclidean/...
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Angle of a regular simplex
I find the following question embarrassing, but I have not been able to either resolve it, or to find a reference.
What is the vertex angle of a regular $n$-simplex?
Background: For a vertex $v$ ...
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Are there infinitely many "generalized triangle vertices"?
Briefly, I'd like to know whether there are infinitely many "generalized triangle centers" which - like the orthocenter - are indistinguishable from a vertex of the original triangle. This ...
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The abc-conjecture as an inequality for inner-products?
The abc-conjecture is:
For every $\epsilon > 0$ there exists $K_{\epsilon}$ such that for all natural numbers $a \neq b$ we have:
$$ \frac{a+b}{\gcd(a,b)}\,\ <\,\ K_{\epsilon}\cdot \text{rad}\...
user6671
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Tetrahedron insphere iteration
I know that iterating the following incircle construction approaches an equilateral triangle in the limit:
Starting with any triangle $T$, one forms $T'$ by connecting ...
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Why do all incidence theorems follow from Pappus' theorem?
In Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen's ``Geometry and the Imagination,"
they state in the last paragraph of Chapter 20 that "Any
theorems concerned solely with incidence relations in the
[Euclidean projective]...
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Does every ellipse inside a tetrahedron inside a ball fit in a triangle inside the ball?
In three-dimensional euclidean space, consider the closed unit ball $B$. Let $T$ be a tetrahedron, and $E$ an ellipse, with $E \subset T \subset B$. Does there necessarily exist a triangle $T'$ with $...
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Aperiodic monotile without reflections?
The recently discovered amazing aperiodic monotile (or "einstein") of David Smith, Joseph Samuel Myers, Craig S. Kaplan, and Chaim Goodman-Strauss tiles the plane only if reflections of the ...
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An elementary problem in Euclidean geometry [closed]
This problem was first put to me by Luke Pebody (who did not know the answer at the time) and after some work I am yet to find a proof or counterexample. I would be grateful of any insights.
Call a ...
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Probability of two vectors lying in the same orthant
Let $S^{d-1} = \{x \in \mathbb R^d: \|x\| = 1\}$ denote the unit sphere in $\mathbb R^d$. Let $v$, $w$ be drawn uniformly at random from $S^{d-1}$, conditioned on their inner product being equal to $\...
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Determine if circle is covered by some set of other circles
Suppose you have a set of circles $\mathcal{C} = \{ C_1, \ldots, C_n \}$ each with a fixed radius $r$ but varying centre coordinates. Next, you are given a new circle $C_{n+1}$ with the same radius $r$...
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Tetrahedra passing through a hole
Assume a plane $P\subset\mathbb R^3$ has a hole $H$, and that the hole is topologically a compact disc. Being so, $P\setminus H$ does not separate the space. A regular tetrahedron $\sigma^3$ (of edge-...
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The geometric median of a triangle
Let $\Omega\subset \mathbb R^n$ be a compact domain of dimension $n$. Define the geometric median on $\Omega$ as the point $m_{\Omega}\in \mathbb R^n$ such that the integral $\int_{\Omega}|x-m_{\Omega}...
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All saddles in the unit ball have area $<2\pi$?
Let $M$ be the saddle surface in $\mathbb R^3$ defined by $x^2-y^2+z=0$. For any $r\geq 0$ and $(x_0,y_0,z_0)\in\mathbb R^3$, let $rM+(x_0,y_0,z_0)$ denotes the surface obtained by scaling $M$ by $r$ ...
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Series for envelope of triangle area bisectors
The lines which bisect the area of a triangle form an envelope as shown in this picture
It is not difficult to show that the ratio of the area of the red deltoid to the area of the triangle is $$\...
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Definition of area
I am looking for an attractive, but rigorous definition of area;
say in Euclidean plane. Probably there is no short definition. It is OK to make it even longer, but can it be built from useful parts ...
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Theorems in Euclidean geometry with attractive proofs using more advanced methods
The butterfly theorem is notoriously tricky to prove using only "high-school geometry" but it can be proved elegantly once you think in terms of projective geometry, as explained in Ruelle's book The ...
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The Ramanujan Problems
I originally thought of asking this question at the Mathematics Stackexchange, but then I decided that I'd have a better chance of a good discussion here.
In the Wikipedia page on Ramanujan (current ...
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Emergence of the orthogonal group
Do we know what mathematician first considered, and perhaps named, what we call the group $\mathrm O(n)$, or $\mathrm{SO}(n)$, for some $n>3$?
I mean it specifically as group (not Lie algebra) ...
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Does a function from $\mathbb R^2$ to $\mathbb R$ which sums to 0 on the corners of any unit square have to vanish everywhere?
Does a function from $\mathbb{R}^2$ to $\mathbb{R}$ which sums to 0 on the corners of any unit square have to vanish everywhere?
I think the answer is yes but I am not sure how to prove it.
If we ...
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Which knots appear as the singular locus of a polyhedral metric on the 3-sphere?
What can be said about a knot $K\subseteq S^3$ for which there exists a (Euclidean) polyhedral metric (aka Euclidean cone-manifold structure) on $S^3$ whose singular locus is precisely $K$? I'm ...
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What sort of models did Bolyai and Lobachevsky use to demonstrate the consistency of their models of non-Euclidean Geometry?
As is well-known, in the 1820s both Bolyai and Lobachevsky showed, at long last, the independence of the Parallel Postulate from the rest of the axioms of Euclidean geometry by developing what we now ...
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Metrics for lines in $\mathbb{R}^3$?
I seek a metric $d(\cdot,\cdot)$ between pairs of (infinite) lines in $\mathbb{R}^3$.
Let $s$ be the minimum distance between a pair of lines $L_1$ and $L_2$.
Ideally, I would like these properties:
...
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