Advent calendar 2020
19 December
The diagram to the right shows a triangle. Two of the sides of the triangle have been split into three pieces, with lines drawn from the opposite vertex. In total, the diagram now contains 27 triangles of any size.
Another triangle has two of its sides split into eight pieces, with lines drawn from the opposite vertex. How many triangles (of any size) would this create?
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Each triangle must include one of the two corners at the base of the largest triangle (or both those corners).
To make triangles including the bottom left corner of the large triangle, we must pick two lines coming out of that corner, and one line coming out of the bottom right corner that is not the base of the triangle.
There are 9 lines coming out of the corners, so the total number of triangles is \(\left(\begin{array}{c}9\\2\end{array}\right)\times\left(\begin{array}{c}8\\1\end{array}\right)=288\).
We now need to count the triangles that include the bottom right corner of the large triangle, but do not include both corners (as we've already counted thoses).
There are \(\left(\begin{array}{c}8\\2\end{array}\right)\times\left(\begin{array}{c}8\\1\end{array}\right)=224\) ways to pick lines to make these triangles.
In total, this makes 512 triangles.
![](javascript:showlimage("advent2020triangles.png"))