Reading the Comics Follow-up: Where Else Is A Tetrahedron’s Centroid Edition

A Reading the Comics post a couple weeks back inspired me to find the centroid of a regular tetrahedron. A regular tetrahedron, also known as “a tetrahedron”, is the four-sided die shape. A pyramid with triangular base. Or a cone with a triangle base, if you prefer. If one asks a person to draw a tetrahedron, and they comply, they’ll likely draw this shape. The centroid, the center of mass of the tetrahedron, is at a point easy enough to find. It’s on the perpendicular between any of the four faces — the equilateral triangles — and the vertex not on that face. Particularly, it’s one-quarter the distance from the face towards the other vertex. We can reason that out purely geometrically, without calculating, and I did in that earlier post.

But most tetrahedrons are not regular. They have centroids too; where are they?

Ben Zaehringer’s In The Bleachers for the 16th of March, 2021. This and other essays featuring In The Bleachers are gathered at this link.

Thing is I know the correct answer going in. It’s at the “average” of the vertices of the tetrahedron. Start with the Cartesian coordinates of the four vertices. The x-coordinate of the centroid is the arithmetic mean of the x-coordinates of the four vertices. The y-coordinate of the centroid is the mean of the y-coordinates of the vertices. The z-coordinate of the centroid is the mean of the z-coordinates of the vertices. Easy to calculate; but, is there a way to see that this is right?

What’s got me is I can think of an argument that convinces me. So in this sense, I have an easy proof of it. But I also see where this argument leaves a lot unaddressed. So it may not prove things to anyone else. Let me lay it out, though.

So start with a tetrahedron of your own design. This will be less confusing if I have labels for the four vertices. I’m going to call them A, B, C, and D. I don’t like those labels, not just for being trite, but because I so want ‘C’ to be the name for the centroid. I can’t find a way to do that, though, and not have the four tetrahedron vertices be some weird set of letters. So let me use ‘P’ as the name for the centroid.

Where is P, relative to the points A, B, C, and D?

And here’s where I give a part of an answer. Start out by putting the tetrahedron somewhere convenient. That would be the floor. Set the tetrahedron so that the face with triangle ABC is in the xy plane. That is, points A, B, and C all have the z-coordinate of 0. The point D has a z-coordinate that is not zero. Let me call that coordinate h. I don’t care what the x- and y-coordinates for any of these points are. What I care about is what the z-coordinate for the centroid P is.

The property of the centroid that was useful last time around was that it split the regular tetrahedron into four smaller, irregular, tetrahedrons, each with the same volume. Each with one-quarter the volume of the original. The centroid P does that for the tetrahedron too. So, how far does the point P have to be from the triangle ABC to make a tetrahedron with one-quarter the volume of the original?

The answer comes from the same trick used last time. The volume of a cone is one-third the area of the base times its altitude. The volume of the tetrahedron ABCD, for example, is one-third times the area of triangle ABC times how far point D is from the triangle. That number I’d labelled h. The volume of the tetrahedron ABCP, meanwhile, is one-third times the area of triangle ABC times how far point P is from the triangle. So the point P has to be one-quarter as far from triangle ABC as the point D is. It’s got a z-coordinate of one-quarter h.

Notice, by the way, that while I don’t know anything about the x- and y- coordinates of any of these points, I do know the z-coordinates. A, B, and C all have z-coordinate of 0. D has a z-coordinate of h. And P has a z-coordinate of one-quarter h. One-quarter h sure looks like the arithmetic mean of 0, 0, 0, and h.

At this point, I’m convinced. The coordinates of the centroid have to be the mean of the coordinates of the vertices. But you also see how much is not addressed. You’d probably grant that I have the z-coordinate coordinate worked out when three vertices have the same z-coordinate. Or where three vertices have the same y-coordinate or the same x-coordinate. You might allow that if I can rotate a tetrahedron, I can get three points to the same z-coordinate (or y- or x- if you like). But this still only gets one coordinate of the centroid P.

I’m sure a bit of algebra would wrap this up. But I would like to avoid that, if I can. I suspect the way to argue this geometrically depends on knowing the line from vertex D to tetrahedron centroid P, if extended, passes through the centroid of triangle ABC. And something similar applies for vertexes A, B, and C. I also suspect there’s a link between the vector which points the direction from D to P and the sum of the three vectors that point the directions from D to A, B, and C. I haven’t quite got there, though.

I will let you know if I get closer.

My All 2020 Mathematics A to Z: Complex Numbers

Mr Wu, author of the Singapore Maths Tuition blog, suggested complex numbers for a theme. I wrote long ago a bit about what complex numbers are and how to work with them. But that hardly exhausts the subject, and I’m happy revisiting it.

Art by Thomas K Dye, creator of the web comics Projection Edge, Newshounds, Infinity Refugees, and Something Happens. He’s on Twitter as @projectionedge. You can get to read Projection Edge six months early by subscribing to his Patreon.

Complex Numbers.

A throwaway joke somewhere in The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy has Marvin The Paranoid Android grumble that he’s invented a square root for minus one. Marvin’s gone and rejiggered all of mathematics while waiting for something better to do. Nobody cares. It reminds us while Douglas Adams established much of a particular generation of nerd humor, he was not himself a nerd. The nerds who read The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy obsessively know we already did that, centuries ago. Marvin’s creation was as novel as inventing “one-half”. (It may be that Adams knew, and intended Marvin working so hard on the already known as the joke.)

Anyone who’d read a pop mathematics blog like this likely knows the rough story of complex numbers in Western mathematics. The desire to find roots of polynomials. The discovery of formulas to find roots. Polynomials with numbers whose formulas demanded the square roots of negative numbers. And the discovery that sometimes, if you carried on as if the square root of a negative number made sense, the ugly terms vanished. And you got correct answers in the end. And, eventually, mathematicians relented. These things were unsettling enough to get unflattering names. To call a number “imaginary” may be more pejorative than even “negative”. It hints at the treatment of these numbers as falsework, never to be shown in the end. To call the sum of a “real” number and an “imaginary” “complex” is to warn. An expert might use these numbers only with care and deliberation. But we can count them as numbers.

I mentioned when writing about quaternions how when I learned of complex numbers I wanted to do the same trick again. My suspicion is many mathematicians do. The example of complex numbers teases us with the possibilites of other numbers. If we’ve defined to be “a number that, squared, equals minus one”, what next? Could we define a ? How about a ? Maybe something else? An arc-cosine of ?

You can try any of these. They turn out to be redundant. The real numbers and already let you describe any of those new numbers. You might have a flash of imagination: what if there were another number that, squared, equalled minus one, and that wasn’t equal to ? Numbers that look like ? Here, and later on, a and b and c are some real numbers. means “multiply the real number b by whatever is”, and we trust that this makes sense. There’s a similar setup for c and . And if you just try that, with , you get some interesting new mathematics. Then you get stuck on what the product of these two different square roots should be.

If you think of that. If all you think of is addition and subtraction and maybe multiplication by a real number? works fine. You only spot trouble if you happen to do multiplication. Granted, multiplication is to us not an exotic operation. Take that as a warning, though, of how trouble could develop. How do we know, say, that complex numbers are fine as long as you don’t try to take the log of the haversine of one of them, or some other obscurity? And that then they produce gibberish? Or worse, produce that most dread construct, a contradiction?

Here I am indebted to an essay that ten minutes ago I would have sworn was in one of the two books I still have out from the university library. I’m embarrassed to learn my error. It was about the philosophy of complex numbers and it gave me fresh perspectives. When the university library reopens for lending I will try to track back through my borrowing and find the original. I suspect, without confirming, that it may have been in Reuben Hersh’s What Is Mathematics, Really?.

The insight is that we can think of complex numbers in several ways. One fruitful way is to match complex numbers with points in a two-dimensional space. It’s common enough to pair, for example, the number with the point at Cartesian coordinates . Mathematicians do this so often it can take a moment to remember that is just a convention. And there is a common matching between points in a Cartesian coordinate system and vectors. Chaining together matches like this can worry. Trust that we believe our matches are sound. Then we notice that adding two complex numbers does the same work as adding ordered coordinate pairs. If we trust that adding coordinate pairs makes sense, then we need to accept that adding complex numbers makes sense. Adding coordinate pairs is the same work as adding real numbers. It’s just a lot of them. So we’re lead to trust that if addition for real numbers works then addition for complex numbers does.

Multiplication looks like a mess. A different perspective helps us. A different way to look at where point are on the plane is to use polar coordinates. That is, the distance a point is from the origin, and the angle between the positive x-axis and the line segment connecting the origin to the point. In this format, multiplying two complex numbers is easy. Let the first complex number have polar coordinates . Let the second have polar coordinates . Their product, by the rules of complex numbers, is a point with polar coordinates . These polar coordinates are real numbers again. If we trust addition and multiplication of real numbers, we can trust this for complex numbers.

If we’re confident in adding complex numbers, and confident in multiplying them, then … we’re in quite good shape. If we can add and multiply, we can do polynomials. And everything is polynomials.

We might feel suspicious yet. Going from complex numbers to points in space is calling on our geometric intuitions. That might be fooling ourselves. Can we find a different rationalization? The same result by several different lines of reasoning makes the result more believable. Is there a rationalization for complex numbers that never touches geometry?

We can. One approach is to use the mathematics of matrices. We can match the complex number to the sum of the matrices

Adding matrices is compelling. It’s the same work as adding ordered pairs of numbers. Multiplying matrices is tedious, though it’s not so bad for matrices this small. And it’s all done with real-number multiplication and addition. If we trust that the real numbers work, we can trust complex numbers do. If we can show that our new structure can be understood as a configuration of the old, we convince ourselves the new structure is meaningful.

The process by which we learn to trust them as numbers, guides us to learning how to trust any new mathematical structure. So here is a new thing that complex numbers can teach us, years after we have learned how to divide them. Do not attempt to divide complex numbers. That’s too much work.

Why The Slope Is Too Interesting

After we have the intercept, the other thing we need is the slope. This is a very easy thing to start calculating and it’s extremely testable, but the idea weaves its way deep into all mathematics. It’s got an obvious physical interpretation. Imagine the x-coordinates are how far we are from some reference point in a horizontal direction, and the y-coordinates are how far we are from some reference point in the vertical direction. Then the slope is just the grade of the line: how much we move up or down for a given movement forward or back. It’s easy to calculate, it’s kind of obvious, so here’s what’s neat about it.

Why Call The Intercept b

Just because there are in principle uncountably many possible equations for any line doesn’t mean we ever actually see any of them. Actually, we just about always pick one of a handful of representations. They’re just the convenient ones. I’m going to say there’s four patterns that actually get used, because I can only think of three that turn up, as long as we’re sticking to Cartesian coordinate systems and aren’t doing something weird like parametric descriptions, and I want to leave some hedge room for when I realize I overlooked the obvious. The first one — that I want to talk about, anyway, and just about the first one anyone encounters — is called the slope-intercept form, and it’s probably what someone means if they do talk about “the” equation for a line.

Why A Line Doesn’t Have An Equation

[ To resume after some interruptions — it’s been quite a busy few weeks — the linear interpolations that I had been talking about, I will need equations describing a line. ]

To say something is the equation representing a line is to lie in the article. It’s little one, of the same order as pretending there’s just one answer to the question, “Who are you?” Who you are depends on context: you’re the person with this first-middle-last name combination. You’re the person with this first name. You’re the person with this nickname. You’re the third person in the phone queue for tech support. You’re the person with this taxpayer identification number. You’re the world’s fourth-leading expert on the Marvel “New Universe” line of comic books, and sorry for that. You’re the person who ordered two large-size fries at Five Guys Burgers And Fries and will soon learn you’ll never live long enough to eat them all. You’re the person who knows how to get the sink in the break room at work to stop dripping. These may all be correct, but depending on the context some of these answers are irrelevant, and maybe one or two of them is useful, or at least convenient. So it is with equations for a line: there are many possible equations. Some of them are just more useful, or even convenient.