Decide the third corner in equilateral triangle

euclidean-geometrygeometrylinear algebra

I have problem from an old exam below:

An equilateral triangle $ABC$ lies in plane $x − y + 2z = 0$. The triangle has a corner in the origin (i.e., $A$ = origin), one to the corner in the point $B = (1,1,0)$, and its third corner has a positive x-component. Determine triangle third corner $C$.

I know that the plane's vector is $(1,-1,2)$ and it is perpendicular to the plane.
And you could think out another vector that is from the point $B$ like.
$(1,1,0) – (0,0,0) = (1,1,0)$ if you subtract that from the origin but after that I get stuck on how to decide the third corner in this problem how should I continue to solve this problem?

Best Answer

The unit normal vector is $\vec{n}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{6}}\langle 1,-1,2\rangle$ and the vector $\overrightarrow{AB}=\langle 1,1,0\rangle$.

Using Rodrigue's rotation formula, the rotation of $\overrightarrow{AB}$ about $\vec{n}$ by $\pm 60^\circ$ is $$\overrightarrow{AC}=\frac{1}{2}\overrightarrow{AB}\pm\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}\vec{n}\times\overrightarrow{AB}+\frac{1}{2}\vec{n}(\vec{n}\cdot \overrightarrow{AB})$$ Since we have $$\vec{n}\times\overrightarrow{AB}=\frac{1}{\sqrt{6}}\langle -2,2,2\rangle$$ $$\vec{n}\cdot\overrightarrow{AB}=0$$ Our equation for $\overrightarrow{AC}$ simplifies to \begin{align} \overrightarrow{AC} &=\frac{1}{2}\langle 1,1,0\rangle\pm\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}\langle -1,1,1\rangle\\ &=\frac{1}{2}\langle 1,1,0\rangle -\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}\langle -1,1,1\rangle\\ &=\boxed{\frac{1}{2}\left\langle 1+\sqrt{2},1-\sqrt{2},-\sqrt{2}\right\rangle} \end{align}

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