Re: Oloid, super-egg

[Chuck Britton <britton@odie.ncssm.edu>]

> Anyone ever hear of a geometrical object called "superegg"?  It was
> supposed to behave like a rolling ball (stable in any position), yet be
> oblong like an egg.
>
> I always wanted to try making one, but never found more info than the
> second-hand story I heard.

	PERHAPS you are refering to Peit Hein's 'SuperEllipse' and such??
Martin Gardner described this wonderful creation in his SciAm column
Mathematical Games. It is probably out in one of his collections of these
columns.

Peit Hein was a Danish poet, artist etc. who invented the Soma puzzle and
wrote a series of books of 'Grooks' such as this one.

		HINT AND SUGGESTION
	Admonitory grook addressed to youth.

	The human spirit sublimates
	the impulses that it thwarts;
	a healthy sex life mitigates
	the lust for other sports.

page 8 of Peit Hein's 'Grooks'  (first of four volumes)

But back to his Super Ellipse. A traffic 'circle' in Copenhagen is designed
after his shape. It is an 'intermediate' curve, falling between the
equation of a rectangle and an ellipse. The exponents of the x and y terms
are fractional.
I suppose the ellipse has exponents equal to 2 and the rectangle has
'exponents' equal to zero?!?!?!?! Th esuperellipse has exponents between 0
and 2.
(All this is just a dim memory from the '60's when the column appeared.)

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Chuck Britton  					Education is what is left when
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