
In
Euclidean geometry, the medial triangle or midpoint triangle of a
triangle is the triangle with
vertices at the
midpoints of the triangle's sides . It is the case of the
midpoint polygon of a
polygon with sides. The medial triangle is not the same thing as the
median triangle
The median triangle of a given (reference) triangle is a triangle
A triangle is a polygon with three edges and three vertices. It is one of the basic shapes in geometry. A triangle with vertices ''A'', ''B'', and ''C'' is denoted \triangl ...
, which is the triangle whose sides have the same lengths as the
medians of .
Each side of the medial triangle is called a ''midsegment'' (or ''midline''). In general, a midsegment of a triangle is a line segment which joins the midpoints of two sides of the triangle. It is parallel to the third side and has a length equal to half the length of the third side.
Properties

The medial triangle can also be viewed as the image of triangle transformed by a
homothety centered at the
centroid with ratio -1/2. Thus, the sides of the medial triangle are half and parallel to the corresponding sides of triangle ABC. Hence, the medial triangle is inversely
similar and shares the same centroid and
medians with triangle . It also follows from this that the
perimeter of the medial triangle equals the
semiperimeter of triangle , and that the
area is one quarter of the area of triangle . Furthermore, the four triangles that the original triangle is subdivided into by the medial triangle are all mutually
congruent by
SSS
SSS or Sss may refer to:
Places
* SSS islands, part of the Netherlands Antilles
* Sheerness-on-Sea railway station, Kent, England, National Rail station code
* Siassi's airport IATA code
* Southern Cross railway station (formerly Spencer Street) ...
, so their areas are equal and thus the area of each is 1/4 the area of the original triangle.
[Posamentier, Alfred S., and Lehmann, Ingmar. '' The Secrets of Triangles'', Prometheus Books, 2012.]
The
orthocenter of the medial triangle coincides with the
circumcenter of triangle . This fact provides a tool for proving
collinearity of the circumcenter, centroid and orthocenter. The medial triangle is the
pedal triangle of the circumcenter. The
nine-point circle circumscribes the medial triangle, and so the nine-point center is the circumcenter of the medial triangle.
The
Nagel point of the medial triangle is the
incenter of its reference triangle.
[Altshiller-Court, Nathan. ''College Geometry''. Dover Publications, 2007.]
A reference triangle's medial triangle is
congruent to the triangle whose vertices are the midpoints between the reference triangle's
orthocenter and its vertices.
[
The incenter of a triangle lies in its medial triangle.][Franzsen, William N.. "The distance from the incenter to the Euler line", ''Forum Geometricorum'' 11 (2011): 231–236.]
/ref>
A point in the interior of a triangle is the center of an inellipse of the triangle if and only if the point lies in the interior of the medial triangle.[Chakerian, G. D. "A Distorted View of Geometry." Ch. 7 in ''Mathematical Plums'' (R. Honsberger, editor). Washington, DC: Mathematical Association of America, 1979.]
The medial triangle is the only inscribed triangle for which none of the other three interior triangles has smaller area.[ Torrejon, Ricardo M. "On an Erdos inscribed triangle inequality", ''Forum Geometricorum'' 5, 2005, 137–141. http://forumgeom.fau.edu/FG2005volume5/FG200519index.html]
The reference triangle and its medial triangle are orthologic triangles.
Coordinates
Let be the sidelengths of triangle . Trilinear coordinates for the vertices of the medial triangle are given by
:
Anticomplementary triangle
If is the medial triangle of , then is the anticomplementary triangle or antimedial triangle of . The anticomplementary triangle of is formed by three lines parallel to the sides of : the parallel to through , the parallel to through , and the parallel to through .
Trilinear coordinates for the vertices of the anticomplementary triangle, , are given by
:
The name "anticomplementary triangle" corresponds to the fact that its vertices are the anticomplements of the vertices of the reference triangle. The vertices of the medial triangle are the complements of .
See also
* Middle hedgehog, an analogous concept for more general convex sets
References
External links
*
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Medial Triangle
Elementary geometry
Objects defined for a triangle
de:Mittelparallele#Mittelparallelen eines Dreiecks