Problem

2015 AMC 12A Problem 25

A collection of circles in the upper half-plane, all tangent to the x-axis, is constructed in layers as follows. Layer L_0 consists of two circles of radii 70^2 and 73^2 that are externally tangent. For k\ge1, the circles in \bigcup_{j=0}^{k-1}L_j are ordered according to their points of tangency with the x-axis. For every pair of consecutive circles in this order, a new circle is constructed externally tangent to each of the two circles in the pair. Layer L_k consists of the 2^{k-1} circles constructed in this way. Let S=\bigcup_{j=0}^{6}L_j, and for every circle C denote by r(C) its radius. What is \sum_{C\in S} \frac{1}{\sqrt{r(C)}}?

[asy] import olympiad; size(350); defaultpen(linewidth(0.7)); // define a bunch of arrays and starting points pair[] coord = new pair[65]; int[] trav = {32,16,8,4,2,1}; coord[0] = (0,73^2); coord[64] = (2*73*70,70^2); // draw the big circles and the bottom line path arc1 = arc(coord[0],coord[0].y,260,360); path arc2 = arc(coord[64],coord[64].y,175,280); fill((coord[0].x-910,coord[0].y)--arc1--cycle,gray(0.75)); fill((coord[64].x+870,coord[64].y+425)--arc2--cycle,gray(0.75)); draw(arc1^^arc2); draw((-930,0)--(70^2+73^2+850,0)); // We now apply the findCenter function 63 times to get // the location of the centers of all 63 constructed circles. // The complicated array setup ensures that all the circles // will be taken in the right order for(int i = 0;i<=5;i=i+1) { int skip = trav[i]; for(int k=skip;k<=64 - skip; k = k + 2*skip) { pair cent1 = coord[k-skip], cent2 = coord[k+skip]; real r1 = cent1.y, r2 = cent2.y, rn=r1*r2/((sqrt(r1)+sqrt(r2))^2); real shiftx = cent1.x + sqrt(4*r1*rn); coord[k] = (shiftx,rn); } // Draw the remaining 63 circles } for(int i=1;i<=63;i=i+1) { filldraw(circle(coord[i],coord[i].y),gray(0.75)); } [/asy]


\textbf{(A)}\ \frac{286}{35} \qquad\textbf{(B)}\ \frac{583}{70} \qquad\textbf{(C)}\ \frac{715}{73}\qquad\textbf{(D)}\ \frac{143}{14} \qquad\textbf{(E)}\ \frac{1573}{146}


Full credit goes to MAA for authoring these problems. These problems were taken on the AOPS website.


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