Cornucopia of Quadrilaterals (eBook)

A Cornucopia of Quadrilaterals collects and organizes hundreds of beautiful and surprising results about four-sided figures-for example, that the midpoints of the sides of any quadrilateral are the vertices of a parallelogram, or that in a convex quadrilateral (not a parallelogram) the line through the midpoints of the diagonals (the Newton line) is equidistant from opposite vertices, or that, if your quadrilateral has an inscribed circle, its center lies on the Newton line. There are results dating back to Euclid: the side-lengths of a pentagon, a hexagon, and a decagon inscribed in a circle can be assembled into a right triangle (the proof uses a quadrilateral and circumscribing circle); and results dating to Erdos: from any point in a triangle the sum of the distances to the vertices is at least twice as large as the sum of the distances to the sides. The book is suitable for serious study, but it equally rewards the reader who dips in randomly. It contains hundreds of challenging four-sided problems. Instructors of number theory, combinatorics, analysis, and geometry will find examples and problems to enrich their courses. The authors have carefully and skillfully organized the presentation into a variety of themes so the chapters flow seamlessly in a coherent narrative journey through the landscape of quadrilaterals. The authors' exposition is beautifully clear and compelling and is accessible to anyone with a high school background in geometry.