People Sitting Around Triangular Tables

combinationscombinatoricscontest-mathpermutationssolution-verification

What is the ratio of number of arrangements of $9$ people sitting
around an isosceles triangular table and the same $9$ people sitting
around an equilateral triangular table with $3$ people sitting on each
side if the table in both the cases?

My solution approach :-
Let's consider the case of isosceles triangular table.
Number of ways in which people can be arranged on the unequal side = $^9C_3 \times 3!$
Number of ways in which people can be arranged on the equal side = $^6P_6 = 6!$
Total number of ways = $^9C_3 \times 3! \times ^6P_6 = 9!$

But when I come to the case of equilateral triangular table I do not have fixed point to start with. That's where I am getting stuck. How to count the number of ways in case of equilateral triangular table?
One side question what can be the number of ways in which $n$ people can sit around a $x-$ sided polygon? I asked this question because it will help me generalize the cases for any regular polygon.

Thanks in advance !!!

Best Answer

It's not necessary to count the number of arrangements around either table; the ratio is simply $3$, because each of the equilateral arrangements corresponds to three isosceles arrangements, letting the "bases" of the isosceles triangles be the three different sides of the equilateral triangle. (This assumes "isosceles" means "isosceles but not equilateral.")

Remark: I was initially just going to post this as a comment, but decided to make it a full fledged answer to stress a point: If you play close attention to exactly what a question asks for, you can sometimes get away with doing a lot less work than you might otherwise anticipate. In this case, actually counting the numbers of arrangements isn't terribly difficult, but it does take some effort. Since the question only asks for the ratio, it suffices to observe that the isosceles arrangements come in groups of three. A more advanced problem might pose a daunting challenge to count the arrangements but still have a simple way to arrive at the ratio.