Tangent Circles

Julia Neal

Given two Circles, find the circle tangent to the two circles. This exercise is interesting to look at for the different cases.

Case 1: One circle is INSIDE the other. In this case, there are actually two different circles that will be tangent to our original circle.

Case 2: The circles intersect. In this case, there are still two tangent circles.

Case 3: The two circles are disjoint. The result is two tangent circles with one so large it approaches being a line.

Click here to open a GSP sketch with a tool to construct the circles tangent to two given circles.

Given a circle and a line, construct the circle tangent to the circle (at an arbitrary point P) and the line.

Click here to proceed to this discussion.

Click here to open a GSP sketch with a tool to construct the circles tangent to the circle and line.

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