Stan Wagon, a mathematician at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., has a
bicycle with square wheels. It’s a weird contraption, but he can ride it
perfectly smoothly. His secret is the shape of the road over which the wheels
roll.
Stan Wagon rides his square-wheeled trike over a special
roadway.
Courtesy of Stan
For those of you who might feel this blog neglects geometry, and the inverted catenary in particular.
Quibble: that looks like a tricycle to me — there’s a basket in between two back wheels.
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That sounds like a Wendy’s promo.
HA HA! That reminds me of an ad for a pizza place (Ledo’s) that says they serve rectangular pizzas because they don’t cut corners like their competitors do.
Karissa, you’re right — I didn’t look closely at the content of the caption when I cut-and-pasted (which is why the caption cuts off Stan’s last name). Oh, well.
Rosemary, I don’t know, but if all its corners falls off, the trike still gets around.
(“Haha hah ha ha ha !”)
Instead of getting a flat does this trike get a triangle?
Actually, I saw a guy on Leno demonstrating this same thing several months ago…
That’s awesome to see it illustrated! In my high school calculus class, we did a little project with Lego blocks to create vehicles, and one group surely did create a little car with square wheels. The catch was that we had to make them travel for at least 20 feet on their own power, but that we could create the surface on which the vehicle would be tested. :^)
btw, Dr. Jerz, it says in the little caption that it is a tricycle.