Carisa Lindsay
Assignment 7:
Tangent Circles
First,
we need to construct tangent circles and geometer’s sketchpad is the easiest
way to do this.
1)
Construct a circle with a smaller circle inside of it.
2)
Then, we can copy the small inner circle and place it at the center point of
tangency.
3)
Make segments of the radii of each circle for later use.
4)
Now, we can construct a circle by center and radius at the point of tangency
and the smaller radius.
5)
Construct a line and then a line segment from the center of the larger original
circle to the center of the newest circle.
6)
Next we can draw a line segment from the center of the small inner circle to
outside point of the other circle. Then
we can create the perpendicular bisector of this line segment.
7)
From this, we can form a triangle. The
third vertex created from this triangle will be the center of the circle
tangent to both smaller circles.
We can also construct
a third tangent circle through a similar construction. This time, we will extend a line through the
other small circle’s diameter and construct the perpendicular bisector. This intersection will allow us to draw
another triangle such that one side of the triangle will act as the center and
radius of another tangent circle.
