I always wondered whether I could generate olympiad geometry problems by simply drawing lines and circles at random until three lines looked concurrent, four points looked concyclic, et cetera. From extensive experience you certainly get the feeling that this ought to be the case – there are tons and tons of problems out there but most of them have relatively simple statements, not involving more than a handful of points. Often I think, “I bet I could have stumbled upon this result just by drawing things at random”.

So one night, I decided to join the tangency point of $A$-mixtilinear circle with the orthocenter of a triangle $ABC.$ You can guess about how well that went. Nothing came up after two hours of messing around randomly.

Surprisingly, though, I found almost by accident that the following modification has had significant success:

1. First …

This is a reflection of a talk I gave today. Hopefully these reflections (a) help me give better talks, and (b) help out some others.

Today I was worked from 6PM-8PM with the Intermediate group at the Berkeley Math Circle, middle school students maybe one or two standard deviations above the average honors student. My talk today was “All you have to do is construct a parallelogram!”. Here is a link to the handout problems and their solutions. (Obviously I only went over a very proper subset of the problems during the lecture.)

Background

Some background information: I had actually given an abridged version of the lecture to the honors geometry class at my Horner Junior High (discussing only 1,2,4,10). It had gone, as far as I could tell, very well. The HJH students audibly reacted as I completed the (short) solutions to their problems, meaning they …