The Logo of Hanoi-Amsterdam High School

XOONG
(which means “a cooking pot” in English)
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I. THE PROBLEM

FIG. 1. (A1, A2) The front gate and the logo of Hanoi-Amsterdam High School. (B) The physical size of the logo at the
front gate, and the position of the center of the globe on the logo. (C) The image of the logo as it appears on the digital
(square-pixelated) image, with the Cartesian coordinates OXY measured in the pixel-unit.

If you ever visit my beloved high school, Hanoi-Amsterdam, you will see the school’s logo as soon as you arrive at
the front gate (see Fig. 1A1 and 1A2). This logo is a flat-square metal-sheet of size 1.00m × 1.00m, in which the the
globe’s center is located at distances 0.25m from the top-edge and 0.25m from the right-edge (see Fig. 1B).
Using a digital camera to take a high-resolution square-pixelated picture of this logo, a student notices that the
image appears deformed: the image of the logo is not a square but a quadrilateral! Choose a Cartesian coordinate
OXY on this picture in which the axes are parallel with the sides of the pixelation, the image of the logo’s vertices
are then at coordinates (0, 325), (679, 0), (704, 492) and (326, 797) as shown in Fig. 1C.
Estimate the coordinate (xE , yE ) of the image of the globe’s center.
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II. A PROPOSED SOLUTION

A. The Math Appetizer

Before dealing with physics, we will need to work out a supplementary math problem. Consider four points A, B,
C, D on a Cartesian coordinate OXY , located at coordinates (xA , yA ), (xB , yB ), (xC , yC ), (xD , yD ). A line passing
through [AB] and a line passing through [CD] should obey the following linear-equations:
yA − yB yC − yD
[AB] : Y − yA = (X − xA ) , [CD] : Y − yC = (X − xC ) . (1)
xA − xB xC − xD

The intersection G of these lines is the solution (xG , yG ) of the above equations, which we can calculate:

(xA yB − yA xB )(xC − xD ) − (xA − xB )(xC yD − yC xD )

xG = ,
(xA − xB )(yC − yD ) − (yA − yB )(xC − xD )
(2)
(xA yB − yA xB )(yC − yD ) − (yA − yB )(xC yD − yC xD )
yG = .
(xA − xB )(yC − yD ) − (yA − yB )(xC − xD )

With this equation, we can determine the coordinates of intersections between lines.

B. The Physics Main-Course

Now it’s time for physics. Or art, since some of you might have learned about the followings in an art class first.
The image formation on the picture (e.g. via pin hole principle) satisfies (at least, when the fish-eye effect is weak):
i/ the image of a point is a point, the image of a line is a line; ii/ parallel lines converge to a point. Thus, here is how
we determine the image of the globe’s center E (xE , yE ) on the picture, via intersections of lines and Eq. (2).

We call the images of the logo’s vertices in the picture to be M, N, P, Q (see Fig. 2), [MN] ∩ [PQ] = R
(2239.390, −746.873) is the image of the square-logo’s center, [MQ] ∩ [NP] = S (750.746, 1411.970) is the image
convergent point of the logo’s top- and bottom-edges, [MP] ∩ [NQ] = T (484.183, 439.856)is the image convergent
point of the logo’s left- and right-edges. The mid-point of the logo’s right-side has its image located at [RT] ∩ [NP] =
U (694.137, 297.902), the mid-point of the logo’s top-side has its image located at [ST] ∩ [PQ] = V (535.715, 627.785),
and finally we can obtain the image of the globe’s center [UV] ∩ [MP] = E (611.466, 470.049).

III. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This problem was given to the xPhO club, a Vietnamese Physics Olympiad group, in the [Physics Popcorn] section
for middle and high school students: https://www.facebook.com/xPhO.org.
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FIG. 2. We can determine the point E via intersections of lines, starting with the image positions of the logo’s vertices.