Alma Wolf

On Patrol POW
2.25.18

Problem Statement
One day, you’re backcountry skiing with a friend and you decide to pass the time while skinning
by thinking about a math problem. Your skintrack makes a straight line up towards one pitch on
the left, and you’ve just skied down, and now you’re going for a second lap and the skintrack is
making a straight line to the right. Where are the places that could you put a point that is
equidistant from each skintrack? What if you do a third lap, and there is a third skintrack
crossing the first two?

Visual Representation(s)
Process
In order to solve this POW, I immediately started drawing pictures. The first part of the problem
involved two lines and where an equidistant point could be. I drew out an ‘x’ with the two lines,
which you can see in the first visual representation above in blue. The red lines represent all the
possible places that a point could be in order to be equidistant from each blue line. I know this is
true because if you draw a line perpendicular to each blue line, they will meet where the red line
is. We learned earlier in Hannah’s class that this is the shortest distance to each line. You can
see this represented by black lines in the drawing. I also used drawings to solve the rest of the
POW, which you can see in the second visual representation above. I drew out the different
arrangements that would be possible with three lines, and I thought through how that would
change for four, five, and more lines.

Solution
If you have two lines that intersect, the point could be located anywhere on a line that bisects
each angle created by the lines’ intersection. You can see what I mean drawn out in the first
visual representation. If you have three lines, it’s impossible to have an equidistant point if all
the lines are parallel, so they must intersect at some place. As you can see in the second visual
representation, there are two other possible arrangements of three lines. The second is that
they all intersect each other and form a triangle, and in that case, the equidistant point would go
in the middle of the triangle. The third arrangement is two parallel lines and one cutting through
them. This would have two possible equidistant points. If you had more than three lines, the
second arrangement is the only one that would work. It would look like a square, then a
pentagon, then a hexagon, etc., and if you had an infinite number of lines it would look like a
circle. That arrangement is the only way that there can be a point equidistant from a bunch of
lines.

Evaluation
This POW wasn’t very difficult for me, and it reminded me a lot of the last POW. I feel like lately,
our POWs have been only slightly more complicated and challenging than the problems in the
book. I really like when the POWs are difficult and have somewhat nuanced answers, like the
problems we talk about in Friday Math Club. Even though I can’t always figure those out, it feels
more valuable to think about them and work on them. There is a problem that we talked about
last week, the four color map problem. I think a problem like this relates to our class because it
has to do with geometry, points and lines, but it’s a little more challenging than a problem out of
the book. Even though some of us have already done it, maybe that could be our next POW.
We could also take it further by doing it on a torus!

Self-Assessment
I think I deserve an A on this POW, because I believe my solution is correct and I put in the time
to think the problem through and solve it. Also, the original problem had several questions and
sub-questions, and I made sure to solve each of those as well.