Congratulations to all the following who sent in very good solutions to this
problem:
David Lowe, age 15, Trinity School, Carlisle (whose solution was the first to
arrive); Babak Shirazi, age 17, Woodhouse SF College, London; Chen Yiwen, age 16,
The Chinese High School, Singapore; Nathan Allpress, age 14, Riccarton High
School, Churchtown, New Zealand; Lee Jia Hui, age 18, National Junior College,
Singapore; Julian Steed (not a student); and finally Alexander Maryanovsky,
age 18, Shevah-Mofet School, Israel. The following solution is made up of bits
supplied by several of these contributors.
The pentagon is made of 5 triangles exactly the same as
, and the pentangle
is made of 5 shapes exactly the same as
.
In order to calculate this ratio exactly we first find the angles and then use
trigonometry.
As
is parallel to
and
is parallel to
,
This ratio is just less than 0.5 meaning the pentangle is a bit smaller than
half the pentagon.
Footnote: You don't need a calculator, from the diagram it is possible
to calculate exact values for the trig. ratios
for
,
,
and
. All the angles marked
with a spot can be shown to be
using simple properties of triangles.
Let
. The triangle
is an isosceles triangle with base angles of
. If
then
. Triangles
and
are similar,
hence
This gives a quadratic equation which can be solved to give
Now we have
and so (using Pythagoras Theorem to find
):