The principle of the isosceles triangle for geometric inequalities (Q815030)

The author gives a sufficient condition establishing when the set of values taken by a function defined on the class of all euclidean triangles is equal to the set of values attained by the same function restricted to the subset of isosceles triangles. In this way he reduces for the triangle geometry many two-parameter problems to one-parameter problems. This characterization turns out to be a useful tool to solve optimization problems in triangle geometry. Let \(g=g(a,b,\pi-a-b)\) be a differentiable function whose arguments are the angles of an arbitrary triangle. Let \(h_{\pm}(x)=g(a\pm x,b\mp x,\pi -a-b)\). It is proved that it is sufficient to restrict \(g\) to the family of isosceles triangles if \[ \left.\frac{dh_{\pm}}{dx}\right| _{x=0}=0 \] if and only if \(a=b\), where \(x\in[0,\min\{| b-c| , \frac{| a-b| }2\}]\). The last part of the paper shows several applications of this method either to provide new proofs of classical inequalities in the geometry of triangles or to obtain new inequalities.