When is an ellipse inscribed in a quadrilateral tangent at the midpoint of two or more sides ?

Abstract

In "Quartic Coincidences and the Singular Value Decomposition" by Clifford and Lachance, Mathematics Magazine, December, 2013, it was shown that if there is a midpoint ellipse(an ellipse inscribed in a quadrilateral, Q, which is tangent at the midpoints of all four sides of Q), then Q must be a parallelogram. We strengthen this result by showing that if Q is not a parallelogram, then there is no ellipse inscribed in Q which is tangent at the midpoint of three sides of Q. Second, the only quadrilaterals which have inscribed ellipses tangent at the midpoint of even two sides of Q are trapezoids or what we call a midpoint diagonal quadrilateral(the intersection point of the diagonals of Q coincides with the midpoint of at least one of the diagonals of Q).

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