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Re: Piet Hein's SuperEllipse



On Tue, 31 Mar 1998, Chuck Britton wrote:

I mispelled his name

Piet Hein

Loads of AltaVista hits, but I didn't see the equation yet.

Now this is odd. I searched Altavista last week and found nothing except
some 3D graphics programs. Now there are a bunch of math forum messages
talking about it. But the dates on them are 1996. But they weren't there
last week!

Anyway, it looks like my idea of a hollow, ball-carrying object is wrong,
and the Superegg simply has four stable positions rather than infinite
number.

I wonder if my mistaken idea would actually work. It's a bit like those
age-old "crackerjack" toys which resembled a medicine capsule having a
heavy ballbearing inside. When allowed to move downhill, it would "walk"
end over end like a crazed bacterium. If the same thing was wood,
ellipsoidal, and had a preceisly sculpted interior, perhaps there is a
particular interior curve which keeps the CG of the steel ball plus wood
shell constantly over the contact point, and at a constant height. It
would be shaped like an egg, but roll like a sphere.

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