Interactive · 2 questions
A quick recap of the triangle centers:
circumcenter: the intersection of the perpendicular bisectors of the sides of the triangle (denoted )
centroid: the intersection of the medians of the triangle (denoted )
orthocenter: the intersection of the altitudes of the triangle (denoted )
incenter: the intersection of the angle bisectors of the triangle (denoted )
So what special properties of isosceles triangles will affect these triangle centers?
Try drawing an isosceles triangle and mark all of its important triangle centers!
In the diagram, we can see that all the triangle centers appear to be collinear!
Let's think about why this might be true. They all appear to lie on the altitude from to , so it would be useful if we could show that for each one.
Having drawn in the altitude, we now see why the results should be true.
Since the triangle is isosceles, . Finally, note that clearly and we have defined so that . But then by AAS we must have that !
This tells us many things: We must have then, so is the midpoint of We must have , so bisects The altitude from must also be the perpendicular bisector of , since it goes through the midpoint of (namely, ) and is perpendicular to
So then this altitude turns out to be not just an altitude, but also an angle bisector, a perpendicular bisector, and a median!
From this, we conclude that the triangle centers must all be collinear in an isosceles triangle.
One final note: what if we have an equilateral triangle? This is essentially a more powerful version of the isosceles triangle, in that all pairs of sides are equal. It turns out that in an equilateral triangle, we actually have that all triangle centers are in the same place (think about why this is true).