Marion Walter’s Theorem Via Mass Points
Posted on July 15, 2014 by girlsangle
I recently had the good fortune of learning Marion Walter’s theorem from Marion Walter herself:
Marion Walter’s Theorem: In a triangle, draw line segments from each vertex to the trisection points on the opposite side. The six drawn line segments will form the edges of a central hexagon. The ratio of the area of the hexagon to that of the whole triangle is 1/10.
An efficient way to prove Marion Walter’s theorem is to use mass points.
In this post, I’ll give details because the proof is a model example of the mass points technique. If you’re having difficulty learning the technique, I hope this post will help it all come together for you. As always, try to use mass points to prove the theorem yourself, and, only after you have tried, read on. If you’ve never heard of mass points before, google it or check out Volume 7, Number 3 of the Girls’ Angle Bulletin.
Spoiler Alert! Proof Below!
It all begins with Archimedes’ Law of the Lever, which we will apply over and over.
Two point masses connected by a massless rod will balance at their center of mass. Archimedes tells us that the distances of each mass from the center of mass satisfy the equation .
The center of mass will lie along the line segment connecting the two masses and sit nearer the heavier one. If the masses are equal, then the center of mass will be exactly halfway between. If one mass is twice the other, then the center of mass will be 2/3 of the way from the lighter to the heavier. (In general, the center of mass is the weighted average of the positions of each object weighted by the mass of that object.)
For a proof of this “piecemeal” way to compute the center of mass and for more information about the center of mass and other applications, see, for instance, Section 19.1 of the Feynman Lectures on Physics, Volume 1, or checkout Volume 7, Number 3 of the Girls’ Angle Bulletin, particularly page 20.
In addition to the Law of the Lever, a beautiful property of the center of mass that we will use repeatedly is that the center of mass can be computed piecemeal. That is, we can split the objects into different sets, compute the center of mass of the objects in each set separately and pretend that each set is replaced by a single point mass equal to the total mass of the objects in that set and located at that set’s center of mass. Then we can compute the center of mass of these pretend point masses to learn the location of the center of mass of the original collection of objects.
For point masses, this “piecemeal” fact enables us to find the center of mass of any number of point masses with repeated application of Archimedes’ Law of the Lever. All we have to do is compute 2 masses at a time, as illustrated in the following figures.