Circle theorems

Part 0: Motivation
Let me go on a rant about geometry. (I promise, we will get to all of the circle theorems
eventually.)

Circles and triangles are two of the most fundamental shapes to exist. And here is why.

The definition of a circle is that every point on the outside (the circumference) has the same
distance to a given point that we choose, the circle centre.

Figure 1: Look, all of these radii are the same! ([Link])

and you might be interested in playing around with this yourself, for instance, by tying your
pencil to a length of string that you hold on the other end, and seeing what happes as you
pull the string taut and draw. Alternatively, you can watch this person doing the exact same
thing: [Link]

Triangles are slightly more complex than circles. There are some things we can directly
observe about triangles, such as their angles or their sides, and we can use special
instruments like a protractor or ruler to be able to measure them. From these, the right
combinations of these will tell us everything we need to know about the triangle. And
polygons, closed shapes made by connecting points with straight lines, are in fact just a
bunch of triangles glued together:

Figures 2, 3: We can divide any polygon into triangles from one vertex, or from any point in
the interior ([Link], BIM development)
 Figure 4: Multiple ways of dividing a polygon into triangles

Circles and polygons: these are the only (two-dimensional) shapes you need to know and
use for IGCSE! (Besides, doing geometry in three dimensions is hard: 3D trig only scratches
the surface, and to do more with lines and planes in 3D you will need knowledge from A
level and further maths.)

So the natural question to ask is, being fundamental objects, what is the relationship
between circles and triangles? Or stated another way, how much can we do when we put
circles and triangles together?

This relationship lies at the essence of circle theorems. Triangles are the missing half of circle
theorems: after all, sides and angles of triangles come up in circle theorems all the damn
time! (Pause to reflect on how terrible a name ‘circle theorems’ really is.) And hopefully you
will discover that despite being so simple, you can come up with endless new relationships
and cool observations after being guided through some yourself.

Part 1: The humble right triangle

Take any right triangle, and make a reflected copy of that triangle. Glue the triangles
together like so: the right angles will join together to make a straight line. We will therefore
have made an isosceles triangle, cause the new larger triangle contains two hypotenuses
which are guaranteed to have the same length, because the triangles are the ‘same’
(congruent).
 Figure 5: Gluing two congruent right triangles together, then breaking them apart

Before we continue further, we should really define what we mean for a triangle to be
congruent to some other triangle. We are looking for a triangle’s size and shape to be the
same, so that a triangle that is rotated or reflected would not make the triangle any
‘different’: it would still be fundamentally the ‘same’.

Importantly, by joining the congruent right triangles, we note that the base angles of the
isosceles triangle must also be the same. (And note that these angles correspond to each
other through the mirror image. This applies much more generally to not just angles:
corresponding parts of congruent triangles are the same.)

We can also undo this process. Break apart any isosceles (two equally long sides) triangle,
and make two congruent right triangles. Easy enough right?

Now importantly, it turns out that if you only know that the angles are equal in an isosceles
triangle, you can deduce that the side lengths must be equal.

Figure 6: Demonstration of angles equal implies sides equal

Given the base of a triangle, note that this is just a line segment. We can always make a
perpendicular line passing through the line segment’s midpoint, a perpendicular bisector, for
any line segment. Now, we can flip one of the angles left-to-right, and move both angles to
start at the endpoints of the line segment. Since we have flipped the angle across the
perpendicular bisector, we have symmetry. The symmetry implies that these two lines must
meet at the same point (if the base angles are right-angled, then the lines are parallel and
hence never meet, but two right angles can never make a triangle). Using symmetry again,
the blue side lengths must be the same.

And it is also possible to show the reverse: given the sides being equal, the base angles must
also be equal:
 Figure 7: Demonstration of sides equal implies angles equal

Using a compass, draw a circle such that it meets the line at two points, which guarantees
the side lengths to be equal. Now we can simply break the triangle into two equal halves.
And when the angle on a straight line is broken into equal halves, we create two right angles,
so we have made two right triangles. These right triangles are the same: they share the
same hypotenuse by definition, the same perpendicular height by our construction, and the
same base length because we have broken the triangle into equal halves. These triangles are
exactly the same in every way, except for the fact that one is a mirror image of the other.
This implies that the base angles correspond to each other, and hence must be equal.

Let us move on now, to how these facts can be applied when we have a triangle in a circle.

Part 2: The three triangles theorem

Take any circle you like, and draw a triangle where all three points are on the circumference.
Or take any triangle you like, and draw a circle passing through the three vertices of the
triangle (turns out, there is always exactly one circle you can draw: pretty cool right?).
Importantly though, the centre of the circle must lie inside the triangle.

After drawing a triangle yourself, what you should immediately think of doing is to draw the
three radii. Like so:

Figure 8: Circle and three radii

Importantly, all of these radii have the same length! So now things should be clicking in your
brain: all three smaller triangles must be… ?

Great, so a natural step would thus be to draw perpendicular bisectors of all three sides.
They all meet at the apex for all three triangles, which here is, the centre. And we have
actually proven our first theorem: the perpendicular bisector of a chord always passes
through the centre! Equivalently, if you drop a perpendicular from the centre to a chord on
the circle, you will have split the chord into two equal halves (bisection). Go back to the
equal angles implies equal sides section of Part 1 to see why.

Okay, we know from two paragraphs ago that each triangle’s base angles are equal.
 Figure 9: Annotated version of figure 8 with three base angles: p, q, r

Now look at the big triangle. The sum of angles in this triangle must be 180 degrees, or that
2p + 2q + 2r = 180. We can rearrange this fact three three ways:

2q + 2r = 180 – 2p, 2p + 2r = 180 – 2q, 2p + 2q = 180 – 2r

Now look at the angles that we do not know yet, the three angles in the centre. Using the
sum of angles in the triangle again, we note that these are: 180 - 2p, 180 - 2q, 180 - 2r.

How interesting! These are just the right-hand sides of the three equalities.

It also turns out that the left-hand sides are related to angles in the diagram. For instance, 2q
+ 2r = 2(q + r). But q + r is on the diagram, and very importantly, it is opposite to the angle in
the centre, 180 - 2p. Take a minute to convince yourself that this is true for the other two
angles in the centre and their opposites.

We have just proven that the angle in the centre is twice the angle at the circumference.

Okay, take a breather. This is a pretty important fact, not least cause everything we have
done so far has been building up to this, but because a ton of circle theorems follow from
this one theorem. For instance:

Figure 10: Not-so-mystery theorem??

Rotate the triangle in the circle to match, and make the two radii flatter and flatter so they
practically become the diameter (try convincing yourself that the angle in the centre proof
works, as in, we can repeat the above steps with any triangle that contains the centre). Well,
the angle on a straight line is 180 degrees, so we must have 2x = 180. This means x = 90.

And boom, that’s another theorem: the (inscribed) angle in a semicircle is 90 degrees.

Figure 11: Okay, I won’t spoil the theorems anymore: this is clearly the alternate segment
theorem

Now remember when I said that the angle in the centre works with any triangle containing
the centre? Pick two points on the circumference, and then make two different triangles by
choosing different third points. The angle in the centre is the same for both of these. So the
angle opposite the centre must also be the same, no matter where the third points are!

Figure 11: Proof that opposite angles in a cyclic quadrilateral add to 180 degrees

And if you were paying attention to what I said in Part 0, we are not limited to triangles
either. Angle in the centre gives 2a + 2b = 360, as the angle around a point is 360 degrees by
definition. Dividing everything on both sides by 2, a + b = 180.
But wait: the a and 2a looks fine, but the b and 2b? Doesn’t the triangle formed by those
two blue sides not contain the centre by now? It seems like the theorem suddenly doesn’t
work!

Go back to figure 10 and imagine pushing the two blue radii up, so that they are now above
the diameter. Nothing has changed: the angle x is still opposite to 2x. This is not a proof of
why the angle in the centre theorem still holds, but should give you an intuitive reason as to
why… Wait, you’re telling me that you don’t want an intuitive reason? You don’t want
guessing? Okay, okay, I get it! Here is your long-awaited proof:

Figure 12: Angle in the centre, special case where triangle does not contain centre

The trick is to use the angle in the centre theorem, once with a triangle that contains the
centre, and another time with a triangle that is ‘moved’ from a triangle that contains the
centre, with the same two base points. An exact proof of the angle in the centre theorem in
this case is on Wikipedia: try to follow it and understand (Part One is the case where the
angles are on the diameter).

We then divide the isosceles triangles intwo congruent right triangles! This is why we droned
so much about them in Part 1. It thus follows that the red angle is 360 – 2b – 2a = 2(180 – (b
+ a)), which is opposite to (90 – b) + (90 – a) = 180 – (b + a). Hence proven.

Part 3: We didn’t do Part 1 for nothing…

For the past while, we have been investigating what we can do with circles and triangles. Let
us take a small diversion and consider what happens with circles and lines.

A circle and a line may not intersect at all. And sure, there are some interesting things we
could do, like pick a point on the circle, and any point on the line, and draw the line segment
between them to see where it intersects the circle. Repeat this for the infinitely many points
on the line, and you make a cool pattern (this branch of maths is known as projective
geometry, by the way). But our focus should be on when a circle and a line intersects twice,
versus when they intersect (so, touch) only once (and they cannot intersect any other
number of times). And what you should find is that it is quite hard to make the line touch
only once, even though there are infinitely many touching (tangent) lines, if you rotate the
same tangent line around the circle. Infinity is weird, after all.

Now it seems like the radius of the circle to that tangent point should divide the straight line
into two equal halves, which makes the angle between the tangent and radius be a right
angle. But how can we prove it?

We are going to use one of a mathematician’s favourite tools. If we want to prove

something, let us play the opposite game: let us try our hardest to prove that it is not true.
What if the angle between a tangent and radius is suddenly not 90 degrees? What will
happen instead?

Figure 13: A circle (not shown) touches the line at only one point, T

To make this diagram work, note that we must have x < 90. And indeed, there are other
possibilities, like x > 90, or x = 90: in fact, these are the only three possibilities.

If you have been paying attention to what I described in Part 1, this next part should come as
no surprise. Construct a perpendicular line to the given line! Then we can make a right
triangle, and its mirror image too!

Figure 14: Mirror image created from figure 13

Yet you should notice a big problem. From Part 1, we must have PT = PT’. That means that
the circle can intersect the line at two points, T and T’.
What has just happened? Did we break mathematics?

No! If you look back and review the previous steps carefully, you will notice that our whole
setup was based on the assumption that x < 90. Everything else that follows is valid, yet we
still end up with a broken conclusion because:

The thing we assumed was wrong in the first place!

Mathematicians (and smart people) call this a contradiction; we have done a proof by
contradiction. Okay, since there were only three possibilities to begin with, what happens if
x > 90 instead?

Figure 15: Case when x > 90, based on figure 14

And you should very quickly discover the that you can just use the supplementary angle in
red, where 180 – x will be now less than 90 degrees. Okay, so there are no other possibilities
left. We really must have x = 90. Indeed, you can observe that this setup now fails: we
cannot make a triangle with two right angles, much less make a mirror image of it. We’ve
exhausted all our possibilities to reach this conclusion, so this is also a proof by exhaustion.

Great, now let us come back to the angle in the centre proof, specifically figure 9:

Figure 16: Re-adapted version of figure 9 with red tangent line

Remember we had those three equations with p, q, r? We can divide each term in those
equations by 2 and we obtain:

q + r = 90 – p, p + r = 90 - q, p + q = 90 – r

And this is exactly what the alternate segment theorem says! Try drawing the other two
tangents to the vertices of the triangle and convince yourself further. It turns out, the most
confusing circle theorem in Cambridge IGCSE is just a natural consequence of the ‘three
triangles theorem’ (this is a name I’ve made; please do not cite this in your exam) and the
tangent-radius theorem we have just proven.

Now, if you refresh your memory and go back to figure 5, notice that we were gluing
congruent right triangles along the heights, and along the bases. Triangles have three sides
of course, so you should feel you are missing something. Indeed, you are:

Figure 17: Demonstration of congruent right triangles being glued together, with circle

Glue the right triangles across their third side: the hypotenuse! Because both triangles are
right-angled, we can construct a circle that is tangent to both of these lines. How so? Instead
of two different circles tangent to the two lines, these two circles are the same, stacked on
top of each other. Corresponding parts of congruent triangles are the same: OT = OT’
through the mirror image, and the circles have the same centre after all. Since a circle is
uniquely defined by its centre and radius, we really only have one circle, as claimed.

Using the corresponding parts of congruent triangles are the same principle once again, we
see that tangents to a circle (from a point outside the circle) are equal in length.

There is one last circle theorem I would like to mention, and it is pretty silly.
 Figure 18: Chords of equal length are the same distance to the circle centre

That is the theorem right there, the last one you need to know for Cambridge IGCSE.
Remember how I said in Part 1 that a triangle which is rotated (or reflected) are the same?
This is literally an application of this principle. By assumption, the black sides are equal, and
the blue sides are all radii of the circle, and must also be equal. Therefore, matching
corresponding parts of both triangles, their perpendicular bisectors must also be equal.
Hence, we have proven the ‘bowtie theorem’.

Part 4: Conclusion
At the beginning of this document, I raised the question:

“How much can we do when we put circles and triangles together?”

Turns out, the answer is, a lot. But more importantly though, observe that all of this
knowledge came from three simple principles. These were:

1) Corresponding parts of congruent triangles must be equal. So if two sides are equal
in a triangle, their base angles must also be equal, and we also demonstrated that
the converse also holds.
2) By dividing a triangle that contains the centre of a circle into three isosceles triangles,
2p + 2q + 2r = 180.
3) A tangent to a circle forms a right angle with the radius.

Note the range of reasoning techniques we used to reach these conclusions and their
corollaries. Point number 3 was proven by proof by contradiction and contradiction, and of
course, by using the isosceles triangle principle in point 1. We also considered many other
“what ifs?” and special cases, from “what happens if the triangle does not contain the
centre?” and the two different possibilities that arise, to “what happens if the radii make the
diameter?”, and “what happens if we make two triangles with the same two base points?”.
We also used specifically used combinations of principles 1, 2, and 3 when we set up new
constructions to further discover facts that relate circles and triangles together.

Here is just one final argument to get you thinking about the power of geometric
construction. Suppose you somehow did not know what fraction of the area the triangle
makes in the rectangular box (this example is borrowed from Paul Lockhart):

Can you figure out how, by drawing just one line, you can show the triangle covers half the
box?

I hope this guided investigation through all of these circle theorems has awakened your
curiosity, piqued your interest in at least one branch of mathematics. Mathematics can
indeed be an inherently inventive, creative, and joyful way of understanding the world, even
if it may take a lot of struggle and practice with reasoning to get to this point.

Below I have left a set of five investigations broadly related to the topics covered in this
document. These investigations actually align with the IGCSE syllabus, helping you to gain a
deeper understanding of why things are true and what types of reasoning techniques can be
used in mathematics.

Investigations
Each investigation will be ranked from 1 to 5 stars, 1 stars being “this is pretty easy if you
think about it”, to 5 stars being “this is way outside the scope of IGCSE and I would be
freaking impressed if you can go through all of the steps of this investigation”.

1. Recall figure 3, on the very first page of this document. For a polygon with n sides,
how many triangles will the polygon be divided into? (try n = 3, 4, 5 if you are stuck).
What happens if you add up all the angles of all the triangles? How can you get to
only the interior angles of the polygon? Hence, what must the formula for the sum of
interior angles be, as an expression in n? (*)

2. Recall again how for an isosceles triangle, if the sides or the base angles were equal,
the two right triangles must be congruent. Let us try to work out what makes any
two triangles congruent. If we have two angles and a side: is this enough information
to determine a unique triangle, and why? How about all three sides: what
construction with circles and lines can you use? How about two sides and the angle
in between? (**)
 Now what happens if the angle is not in between? Draw a diagram to demonstrate
why you believe this is the case. (** + ½)

Are these all the possibilities, given we want to make a word with three letters, and
each letter can be either an S (side) or an A (angle)? (** + *)

3. Observe this diagram. Using circle theorems,

what relationship can you find between the
angles? Using your work from question 2,
which triangles must be similar? (same shape,
so no side lengths needed) Thus, what can you
conclude about the lengths in this figure? (**)

4. Go and search up the intersecting secant theorem: how might you prove that? (**)
And how might you tweak this configuration to prove the secant-tangent theorem
with barely any work? (** + ½)

5. Recall how you can draw a perpendicular line from a point to any side, and in
general, the side may not necessarily be cut into half (this only works for isosceles
triangles). These perpendicular lines are called altitudes. Given the lengths of three
of these altitudes, can you guarantee it is possible to make a unique triangle? (*****)

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to BBC Bitesize and Tim Devereux, whose derivations here and here for the
angle in the centre theorems and alternate segment theorems I have repurposed.

Thank you also to Andrew French, maths and physics teacher at Winchester College, whose
work here happens to have many similarities to what I have described due to being based on
the (I)GCSE syllabus.

I have also borrowed some images from the internet for figures 1, 2, 3, and 4, whose sources
are [Link], [Link], [Link] and [Link].

Thank you to all the maths teachers, fellow peers, and other supportive people in my life for
making this guide possible. In no particular order, I would like to thank my tutor Adrian who
helped me get an A in Cambridge IGCSE mathematics when I was in year 7, a tutor whose
name I have forgotten for helping me pass AP Calculus BC, my year 7 maths teacher Dr
Bushell and my IB maths teacher Mr Allen.

And of course, all of you on Discord! Not just on the r/IGCSE Discord, but also on the IB
Discord, the mathematics Discord, as well as the Edexcel Discord server.
Afterword: how much information is enough?
If you go back to the very beginning of this document, you will notice that a circle can be
defined pretty easily using only two pieces of information: centre1 and radius.

You might therefore wonder how many pieces of information it takes to uniquely define a
triangle. A triangle seems a bit more complicated than a circle. It has three sides and three
angles, which can all differ, so it seems that the answer should be more than two. In fact,
here is a fairly good indication as to why two pieces of information are not enough to define
a triangle:

Figure 19: Base and perpendicular height clearly do not define a triangle: if the diagram
were drawn better, these would all have the same area

And if you have done investigation number 2, you should be convinced that this is the case
(two sides? nope, two angles? nope, although that does tell you the shape but not the size).
We call this lack of information being under-determined.

Yet sometimes, we could also have too much information! Take for example how we know
that there will always be a unique line through any two points. We could swap the two
points for the slope and y-intercept, y = mx + c. We could also have the x- and the y-
intercepts, x/a + y/b = 1, which is again two points of information.

But take a look at what happens when ax + by = c. This is still a line: we have by = -ax + c or y
= -(a/b)x + c/b. It seems like we have three pieces of information, but it turns out one of the
variables is redundant. Take 2x + 3y = 5 for example and multiply both sides by 2: 4x + 6y =
10, and we end up with the same line. So this is an over-determined situation.

What about other shapes, like a rectangle? (a square is a special rectangle, after all). It turns
out that you only need three points (not all lying on the same line): think about why the
fourth point is determined by the other three. The same is also true for a parallelogram. Yet
it is not necessarily true for a kite: again, think about the different cases of three points you
could have here.

You can also figure out that you need three points to narrow the situation down to a unique
circle. You need two perpendicular bisectors to intersect at what will become the centre of

1
From a Euclidean point of view, so in Cartesian coordinates or say polar coordinates, you would need an x-
and a y-coordinate, or distance from origin and angle from positive x-axis
the circle, as you can only make an intersection point from two (non-parallel) lines. Now, the
trick is to use one of the points for both bisectors. If you call the three points A, B, C and the
centre O, then by mirror image symmetry, OA = OB, but OB = OC, so OA = OB = OC = r and
we have made a circle, with centre O and radius r.

Unexpectedly though, you need an entirely different type of logic for a quadratic. We’ll use
the form 𝑦 = 𝐴𝑥 2 + 𝐵𝑥 + 𝐶. With three points (𝑥1 , 𝑦1 ), (𝑥2 , 𝑦2 ), (𝑥3 , 𝑦3 ), we get three
linear equations with unknowns 𝑎, 𝑏, 𝑐:

(𝑥1 )2 𝐴 + (𝑥1 )𝐵 + 𝐶 = 𝑦1

(𝑥2 )2 𝐴 + (𝑥2 )𝐵 + 𝐶 = 𝑦2

(𝑥3 )2 𝐴 + (𝑥3 )𝐵 + 𝐶 = 𝑦3

Three linear equations in three unknowns: this is indeed enough information. We have for
instance 𝑦1 − (𝑥1 )2 𝐴 + (𝑥1 )𝐵 = 𝑦2 − (𝑥2 )2 𝐴 + (𝑥2 )𝐵 and 𝑦1 − (𝑥1 )2 𝐴 + (𝑥1 )𝐵 = 𝑦3 −
(𝑥3 )2 𝐴 + (𝑥3 )𝐵. These two linear equations tell us the values of A, B, and hence we know C.
In fact, we only need two different pairs of equations. Two equations in three variables will
only give us one pair, so three points is indeed the bare minimum to uniquely define a
quadratic.

Figure 20: Conic sections and their relation to cuts of different angles on a cone

It turns out the equation for any conic can be described as 𝐴𝑥 2 + 𝐵𝑥𝑦 + 𝐶𝑦 2 + 𝐷𝑥 + 𝐸𝑦 +
𝐹 = 0. But as we saw with the line 𝐴𝑥 + 𝐵𝑦 = 𝐶, one of the variables is redundant. We can
likewise divide every term in the general conic section equation by 𝐴, and by similar
reasoning, we need five different points to determine a conic.

But these equations aren’t linear! There is no guarantee our conic will be unique.

We have stumbled into a branch of research mathematics called projective geometry, which
is related to the example I gave of projecting points on a line onto a circle, in the beginning
of Part 3.
There is also an entirely different branch of geometry where we are allowed to use
coordinates. So you could think about transformations that change the grid of the xy-plane.
Since the plane is made up of a repeating square grid, you could think about what happens
when we move the point (1, 0) somewhere, and the point (0, 1) somewhere else: what grid
this would create. These are the foundations of a branch of maths called linear algebra.

So through all of these examples, where we were making equations relating different angles
to each other and calling them variables, or the quadratic equation example in this
afterword, algebra and geometry are actually two complementary ways, two interconnected
lenses of understanding and exploring mathematics. Algebra continues with the study of
functions, and eventually calculus, which is just the study of how functions change.
Geometry combines with more of the same, with deeper and more intricate connections
between lines, points, circles, and triangles in Euclidean geometry (sadly, schools only teach
the most basic of Euclidean geometry these days). Algebra and geometry also combine in
trigonometry and the study of trigonometric functions, as well as with 3D geometry, where
lines, planes, and vectors and their intersections are explored.

I have already said a lot in this document, so I will not bother you with any more examples of
how these fields arise naturally from asking simple questions about the world. Through
investigation, pattern-matching, and asking the right questions to gain a deeper
understanding of a concept and its limitations, we can discover a lot not about just
mathematics, but about all subjects and the world at large.

Thank you all for reading if you have reached this sentence. I look forward to chatting with
you all on the server as usual: happy exploring (mathematics)!

Yours sincerely,
south

25.01.2025

end of document.