Converse of Ptolemy’s Theorem

Publication Date

1-1-2025

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Title

Lecture Notes on Data Engineering and Communications Technologies

Volume

218

DOI

10.1007/978-3-031-71013-1_23

First Page

247

Last Page

258

Abstract

In The Almagest, we found the original Ptolemy’s theorem and its proof, and we compared it to “Ptolemy’s theorem” written in two modern geometry textbooks. They are different in that the new ones include the “converse” of the original one. We noticed the hypothesis of the “converse” can be interpreted in two ways. Using this as our motivation, we establish a new theorem related to Ptolemy’s theorem in this note as follows: If four distinct points A, B, C, D are given in the three-dimensional space so that ABC is a triangle, and if |AB||CD|+|AD||BC|=|AC||BD|, then the points A, B, C, D are not only on the same plane, but ABCD is also a cyclic quadrilateral.

Keywords

Crelle’s theorem, Law of Sines, Ptolemy’s theorem, quadrilateral, skew quadrilateral, The Almagest

Department

Mathematics and Statistics

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