Re: United Airlines magazine has surprisingly hard geometry problem

tchow_at_lsa.umich.edu
Date: 07/29/04 

Date: 29 Jul 2004 14:04:10 GMT

In article <ce9m1n$68a$1@news.math.niu.edu>,
Dave Rusin <rusin@vesuvius.math.niu.edu> wrote:
>"adventitious angle" problems -- problems which can be solved by
>embedding the picture into a regular polygon somehow, taking
>advantage of the particular measures of the angles given.

Embedding the picture into a regular polygon? That's interesting. One
friend I showed it to immediately thought of treating the triangle as
one "wedge" of a regular 18-gon, and I think that he concluded that if
lines CD and AE were extended, they would be diagonals of the 18-gon.
But he didn't see what to do after that. Can this approach be pushed
through? 

-- 
Tim Chow       tchow-at-alum-dot-mit-dot-edu
The range of our projectiles---even ... the artillery---however great, will
never exceed four of those miles of which as many thousand separate us from
the center of the earth.  ---Galileo, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences