Lines on a Plane
Source: 1990 Putnam B6
July 13, 2013
SupportratioPutnamcollege contests
Problem Statement
Let be a nonempty closed bounded convex set in the plane. Let be a line and a positive number. Let and be support lines for parallel to , and let be the line parallel to and midway between and . Let be the band of points whose distance from is at most , where is the distance between and . What is the smallest such that for all ? ( runs over all lines in the plane.)