This is a beautiful puzzle initially sent to me a month back by Arunima, a friend from IIT Delhi now in Washington DC. The same puzzle was sent to me by another friend’s son, Amol Aggarwal, now doing his PhD in Math from Harvard. No, you do not need to be a PhD to solve this one though, so do not get scared š
Please take a look at the figure above. This is drawn on a standard 2-dimensional grid with an x-axis and a y-axis. There are two points A and B at location (0,1) and (5,11) respectively. Your task is to find a point C on the x-axis such that AC+BC is the shortest.
As always, please send your answers directly to me at alokgoyal_2001@yahoo.com. If you like the puzzle, please share it with others. If you have interesting puzzles to share, please send them to me at my e-mail given above.
Happy path finding!