Interactive · 1 question
We're learning about a new way to represent power of a point, right? Because of this, we should already know different ways to calculate the power of a point . In the above diagram, which of the quantities below represent the power of the point P?
In the diagram, is the center of the circle, which has (let's say) radius . Out of the 3 ways to represent the power above, the third way () is the least useful, since don't have much information attached to them, since they're just random points on the circle. Let's use the definition of power equals first.
Note that since is a tangent to the circle, . Therefore, by the Pythagorean Theorem, .
Now let's use the definition. Then the power is , again. Therefore, we can also define the power of a point in the plane with respect to a circle with center and radius to be .
Now, let's look at the equation of a circle. The equation of a circle is , which can also be written as . Now, let the point have coordinates .
When we plug in the point for on the LHS of the above equation, what do we get? We get . But what does actually mean? Well, it's just the distance from to (the center), squared, so it actually just equals !. So , and we once again get the power of a point!