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Concept
Incenter
Summary
In geometry, the incenter of a triangle is a triangle center, a point defined for any triangle in a way that is independent of the triangle's placement or scale. The incenter may be equivalently defined as the point where the internal angle bisectors of the triangle cross, as the point equidistant from the triangle's sides, as the junction point of the medial axis and innermost point of the grassfire transform of the triangle, and as the center point of the inscribed circle of the triangle.
Together with the centroid, circumcenter, and orthocenter, it is one of the four triangle centers known to the ancient Greeks, and the only one of the four that does not in general lie on the Euler line. It is the first listed center, X(1), in Clark Kimberling's Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers, and the identity element of the multiplicative group of triangle centers.
For polygons with more than three sides, the incenter only exists for tangential polygons - those that have an incircle that is tangent to each side of the polygon. In this case the incenter is the center of this circle and is equally distant from all sides.
It is a theorem in Euclidean geometry that the three interior angle bisectors of a triangle meet in a single point. In Euclid's Elements, Proposition 4 of Book IV proves that this point is also the center of the inscribed circle of the triangle. The incircle itself may be constructed by dropping a perpendicular from the incenter to one of the sides of the triangle and drawing a circle with that segment as its radius.[[Euclid's Elements|Euclid's Elements]], Book IV, Proposition 4: To inscribe a circle in a given triangle. David Joyce, Clark University, retrieved 2014-10-28.
The incenter lies at equal distances from the three line segments forming the sides of the triangle, and also from the three lines containing those segments. It is the only point equally distant from the line segments, but there are three more points equally distant from the lines, the excenters, which form the centers of the excircles of the given triangle.
Official source
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