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darij grinberg
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After two concrete answers, let me give a third, rambling answer:

A few years ago I decided to completely quit elementary geometry because it was still taking up half of my time even as I was already studying in university. Given that I have been doing it for most of my schoolyears, this should give an impression of how much there is to be done there - and all of it is comprehensible to a good school student.

I will not go into details, but this is a community wiki post ;)

First, there are so many lines in a triangle meeting at one point that one can reasonably ask whether there exist three symmetrically-defined lines not doing so. (There are, of course: e. g., the reflections of the medians in the corresponding altitudes.) This does not change the fact that each concurrence theorem is still a nontrivial result asking for a proof. Some of the basic cases can be handled with Ceva; harder results can take a dozen of pages to prove. The points where these lines concur often have several equivalent characterizations and collinearity properties (like the Euler line); this led Clark Kimberling to make an encyclopedia of such points similar to Sloane's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences. An easy example is the concurrence of the lines $AX$, $BY$, $CZ$, where $X$, $Y$, $Z$ are the points where the incircle of triangle $ABC$ touches the sides $BC$, $CA$, $AB$. (The point where they concur is known as the Gergonne point of triangle $ABC$, known as $X_7$ in 1.) A not-so-easy example: If $O$ is the circumcenter of triangle $ABC$, then the lines connecting $A$, $B$, $C$ with the circumcenters of triangles $OBC$, $OCA$, $OAB$ concur. (This is the Kosnita point, aka $X_{54}$ in 1.) Then there are more complicated things, like: Consider the points where the excircle of triangle $ABC$ opposite to $A$ touches the extended sides $AB$ and $AC$. Let $M_a$ be the midpoint between these two points. Let $M_b$ and $M_c$ be defined similarly. Let the incircle of triangle $ABC$ touches the sides $BC$, $CA$, $AB$ at $X$, $Y$, $Z$. Then, the lines $M_aX$, $M_bY$, $M_cZ$ concur (at a point which is $X_{1122}$ in 1; this is something I have discovered back in schooltime when playing around with dynamic geometry software).

Of course, concurrent lines aren't even half of the fun. There are theorems like Feuerbach's, stating that the nine-point circle touches the incircle and the excircles. This is some centuries old. Here is one found in 2000 by Floor van Lamoen: The medians of a triangle subdivide it in six little triangles (of equal area, by the way); the circumcenters of these triangles lie on one circle! Or here is another tangency property: If the incircle of triangle $ABC$ touches the side $BC$ at a point $X$, then the incircles of triangles $ABX$ and $ACX$ touch each other.

All theorems I mentioned can be proven in a synthetic way, i. e., using merely the part of elementary geometry studied in school, without coordinates or overly long computations. ("Overly long" is subjective and I am well aware of this.) This makes the field completely accessible to students. This is not to say that advanced mathematics doesn't shed some new light on it. For instance, one could try generalizing the above-mentioned Kosnita point by looking for all the points $P$ such that the lines connecting $A$, $B$, $C$ with the circumcenters of triangles $PBC$, $PCA$, $PAB$ concur. The answer turns out to be that the set of such points $P$ is a cubic curve known as the Neuberg cubic of triangle $ABC$. The sheer amount of interesting points on it allow for some neat applications of the group law on cubics to elementary geometric theorems.

I have been rather sparse with sources, as I haven't been keeping track of them for years. Some can be found on my links page, but it has not been updated since 2008 or so. Nowadays Jean-Louis Ayme's blog is the best place to find more synthetic proofs than one could ever read. There are also some good books. (Sorry for linking to my page this often; it is the one place on the internet I am most familiar with...)

darij grinberg
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