Difficulties in the passage from secondary to tertiary education.
A simple proof is presented of a famous, and difficult, theorem by Jakob Steiner. By means of a straightforward transformation of the triangle, the proof of the theorem is reduced to the case of the equilateral triangle. Several relations of the Steiner deltoid with the Feuerbach circle and the Morley triangle appear then as obvious.
A form-finding problem for tensegrity structures is studied; given an abstract graph, we show an algorithm to provide a necessary condition for it to be the underlying graph of a tensegrity in Rd (typically d=2,3) with vertices in general position. Furthermore, for a certain class of graphs our algorithm allows to obtain necessary and sufficient conditions on the relative position of the vertices in order to underlie a tensegrity, for what we propose both a geometric and a symbolic approach.
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