Pedal Triangle? I thought we were riding bikes!

By Stephanie Britt

GSP for general Pedal Triangle

A pedal triangle is an arbitrary point within the plane of a triangle. We began our pedal triangle with point p outside Triangle ABC.

We see that the point p and Pedal triangle EFG that we have an obtuse triangle.

The display below shows that no matter where p occurs on the outside of the triangle that the triangle will remain and obtuse triangle.

This is a link to observe.

Pedal P Obtuse

 

If point P is on the inside of the triangle our pedal triangle looks like

And if our point P is on the edge of the orginal triangle our Pedal triangle looks like

Let's explore the possibilities of similar triangle created by having the pedal p occur within the triangle.

Now we can see that the triangles appear to be similar but are they, but with a little investigation we see that it takes three pedal triangles to create similar triangles.

We can see that the third and smallest pedal triangle created from point P is similar to the original triangle.

Below is a link to use to test if this is true for all points p within the original triangle.

Similar Pedals

If we rotate point p about the incenter of the triangle we get an interesting pattern.

What can you create?

Rotation of p script

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