I assume there are some plus signs that aren't rendering for some reason, so that the plane should be

.
You're minimizing

subject to the constraint

. Note that

and

attain their extrema at the same values of

, so we'll be working with the squared distance to avoid working out some slightly more complicated partial derivatives later.
The Lagrangian is

Take your partial derivatives and set them equal to 0:

Adding the first three equations together yields

and plugging this into the first three equations, you find a critical point at

.
The squared distance is then

, which means the shortest distance must be

.
Answer:
14 knots
Step-by-step explanation:
We know the speed (55 knots) is 6 more than 3.5 times the winner of the monohull in the 2007 tournament.
So let's set the variable for the speed of the monohull to <em>m</em>. Now, let's set up an equation:

We can solve this by first subtracting 6 from both sides to get:

Dividing both sides by 3.5 we get:

That means that the top speed of the monohull in the 2007 tournament was 14 knots
Answer: 11/23
Step-by-step explanation:
I used my calculator to convert those fractions into decimal form and found the biggest number. It was about 0.4789.