Monday, November 7, 2011

Monday, November 7th

Problem
Given any five points on a sphere, show that some four of them must lie on a closed hemisphere.


Solution
Take two different points and construct the great circle that passes throughout them. By the pigeon-hole principle there is a hemisphere (closed) that contains 2 of the 3 remaining points. Hence this hemisphere will contain 4 of the 5 initial points. 

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