Bicycle Riding on Square Wheels
A mathematician (who else) has designed a bicycle the rides on squares wheel....smoothly. How does he accomplish this seemingly impossible feat? Well, he moved the roundness of the wheel to the road.
In essence, as the radius from the "wheel" center to the edge changes, the road counteracts this and together they produce a straight line. Pretty clever.
Additionally, you could make a road that would work with a pentagon, hexagon, etc....and as you increase the sides the inverted cateneries that make up the road get smaller and smaller.....and as you approach infinity, voila, you end up with a round wheel and a flat road.
Posted by answerguru at June 13, 2004 04:41 PM | TrackBack