A circle is added to the equally spaced $5*5$ grid of vertices, alongside. Find the largest number of dots that the circle can pass through :-

circlesgraph theory

A circle is added to an equally spaced $5*5$ grid of vertices, alongside . Find the largest number of dots that the circle can pass through.

What I Tried: I experimented with the problem by trying to make circles in Geogebra.

The most number of points I was able to join was $8$.

However, there were $4$ options given to me and they were :-
$i)$ $4$
$ii)$ $6$
$iii)$ $18$
$iv)$ $10$

So $8$ is not the answer, and I am thinking it is $10$.

I tried in many ways to get $10$ points intersected, but I could not do that even in Geogebra.

Can anyone help me give the correct answer? Also it would be better if someone explains how to solve problems like these, without Geogebra and on normal paper.

Note that circles can intersect from outside the $5*5$ grid too, and I tried in that way as well.

Best Answer

Let me first restate the problem: what is the maximum size of a concyclic subset of $\{1,2,3,4,5\}^2 \subseteq \mathbb{R}^2$?

Let's first consider some easy bounds on the problem. Since there is a circle through any three noncollinear points, the answer is at least 3. For an upper bound, notice that the point set is contained in five lines, and a line intersects a circle in at most two points. So the answer is at most 10.

The example you found is natural to come up with, since the point set has 8-fold symmetry. There are other similar examples, like a circle of radius $\sqrt{5}$ centered at the center of the point set. So the answer is at least 8.

This question may seem difficult because there are infinitely many circles, but since the point set is finite, there are actually a tractable number of circles that contain many points. I claim that 10 is not the answer. Suppose there was a circle going through ten points -- it must go through exactly two in each row and two in each column. The number of choices for these points in the first row is $\binom{5}{2} = 10$, and given these points, the number of choices for another point in the same row as the lower point is $4$. So you only need to check 40 circles. One could come up with longer arguments excluding more circles, but 40 is not too big.

In fact, you can use the exact same argument to show that 9 is not the answer. So 8 is the correct answer.

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