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Concept
Triangle center
Summary
In geometry, a triangle center or triangle centre is a point in the triangle's plane that is in some sense in the middle of the triangle. For example, the centroid, circumcenter, incenter and orthocenter were familiar to the ancient Greeks, and can be obtained by simple constructions.
Each of these classical centers has the property that it is invariant (more precisely equivariant) under similarity transformations. In other words, for any triangle and any similarity transformation (such as a rotation, reflection, dilation, or translation), the center of the transformed triangle is the same point as the transformed center of the original triangle.
This invariance is the defining property of a triangle center. It rules out other well-known points such as the Brocard points which are not invariant under reflection and so fail to qualify as triangle centers.
For an equilateral triangle, all triangle centers coincide at its centroid. However the triangle centers generally take different positions from each other on all other triangles. The definitions and properties of thousands of triangle centers have been collected in the Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers.
Even though the ancient Greeks discovered the classic centers of a triangle they had not formulated any definition of a triangle center. After the ancient Greeks, several special points associated with a triangle like the Fermat point, nine-point center, Lemoine point, Gergonne point, and Feuerbach point were discovered.
During the revival of interest in triangle geometry in the 1980s it was noticed that these special points share some general properties that now form the basis for a formal definition of triangle center. , Clark Kimberling's Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers contains an annotated list of 50,730 triangle centers. Every entry in the Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers is denoted by or where is the positional index of the entry. For example, the centroid of a triangle is the second entry and is denoted by or .
Official source
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