Paper detail

Squares from any Quadrilateral

In 1998 A. Connes proposed an algebraic proof of Morley's trisector theorem. He observed that the points of intersection of the trisectors are the fixed points of pairwise products of rotations around vertices of the triangle with angles two thirds of the corresponding angles of the triangle. This paper enquires for similar results when the initial polygon is an arbitrary quadrilateral. First we show that, when correctly gathered, fixed points of products of rotations around vertices of the quadrilateral with angles (2n+1)/2 of the corresponding angles of the quadrilateral form essentially six parallelograms for any integer n. Several congruence relations are exhibited between these parallelograms. Then, we show that if the original quadrilateral is itself a parallelogram, then for any integer n four of the resulting parallelograms are squares. Hence we present a function which, when applied twice, gives squares from any quadrilateral. The proofs use only algebraic methods of undergraduate level.