Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/paper-2/11/c/solution

Let . A point on the line has position vector . By bilinearity and antisymmetry of the cross product,
For a point with position vector , the area of the parallelogram spanned by and equals base length times perpendicular Euclidean distance. Hence the shortest Euclidean distance to the line is
For , these quantities are
Thus . The perpendicular meets at , whose displacement from has precisely this length.

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