Triangle of Medians
Rozina Essani
2. If the
original triangle is equilateral, then the triangle of medians is equilateral.
Will an isosceles original triangle generate and isosceles triangle of medians?
Will a right triangle always generate a right triangle of medians? What if the
medians triangle is a right triangle? Under what conditions will the original
triangle and the medians triangle both be right triangles?
We know that if the original
triangle is equilateral, then the triangle of medians is equilateral.
Now let us see if the same applies
to an isosceles triangle.
Steps to making an isosceles
triangle:
1.
create
a line segment of any length
2. find its midpoint
3.
construct a
perpendicular bisector at the midpoint
4.
pick and random
point on the perpendicular bisector
5.
connect the
vertices of the original segment to the point on the perpendicular bisector
6.
to create the
triangle of medians find the midpoint of AB, BC and AC, connect any one vertex
with the opposite midpoint in this cast CD
7.
draw parallels
and D and C as shown
8.
the shaded
triangle is our triangle of medians
The above illustration shows that
the triangle of medians of the original isosceles triangle is also an isosceles
triangle, but our triangle of medians has sides CD and ED that are equal and
respectively angles ECD and DEC equal. No matter what our altitude is for the
original Isosceles triangle, our triangle of medians will be isosceles.
Let us now see if the same occurs
for right angle triangles:
Construction of a Right Angle Triangle:
1.
construct
a segment of any length
2. at one end of the segment construct
a perpendicular line
3.
pick any point at
random on the perpendicular line
4.
construct line
segment from the point to the vertices of the original line segment
5.
do same for the
construction of triangle of medians as we did with the equilateral and
isosceles triangles
We see that the triangle of medians
CDE for right triangle ABC is not a right triangle. All three angles are
effected when we change the height of AB whereas when we change BC we donŐt see
a change in angles in CDE.
What if the medians triangle is a
right angle triangle?
We have now made both our triangles
right triangles. We see that in both cases two of our medians must be
perpendicular in order to give us a right triangle of median.
We can also show that our triangle
of medians is ¾th the area of the original triangle. Lets use the case
of the right triangle for example.