Dogs on leashes dragging their owners. Surely, this has nothing to do with maths! Well, if they are running along a line perpendicular to the initial direction of the leash, the owners will be dragged along a curve called tractrix.🐶 [Wiki bit.ly/2stpcUl] #50FamousCurves
Look at them doggos go. Aren't they cute? Unfortunately, I couldn't find the source of these cute drawings, hence the lack of image credit. If anyone finds the OP let me know!
Fun fact about the tractrix: The envelope of lines perpendicular to the tractrix is a hyperbolic cosine, which is also called a catenary, because it's the curve describing the shape of a hanging chain. #50FamousCurves
Fun fact about the tractrix: The area between a tractrix of parameter 'a' and its asymptote equals a²π/2. #50FamousCurves
Fun fact about the tractrix: It is used in making horn loudspeakers. In fact, a horn with tractrix shaped contour minimizes distortion caused by internal reflection of sound within the horn. #50FamousCurves [Source: bit.ly/2RPFNjl]
Fun fact: If you rotate a tractrix about its asymptote you'll get a surface with constant negative Gaussian curvature¹. This is the pseudosphere². It serves as a model for hyperbolic geometry. #50FamousCurves
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¹Except for the equator.
²The sphere has constant positive curvature.
How to draw a tractrix? You'll need the following: 1) Marked points 1,2,3,... on a base-line L at equal intervals. 2) Lines at right angles to L through 1,3,... 3) Quarter circles of a fixed radius with centres at points 2,4,... 4) A point C₁ on line 1.
(1/2) #50FamousCurves
5) Draw a tangent from C₁ to circle 2 to get point T₂. 6) Draw an arc centred at C₁ through T₂ to circle 4 to get T₄. 7) The line C₁T₂ meets line 3 at C₃.
Repeat 6&7 with C₃,C₅,... & T₄,T₆,...
Arcs joining T₂,T₄,T₆,... approximate a tractrix. (2/2) #50FamousCurves
Fun fact: The timing belts in many cars/motorbikes have small teeth with tractrix shaped profiles, because this shape minimizes the friction of the belt teeth and the pulley. #50FamousCurves
Earlier this year a friend* and I've solved a long-standing problem which, in part, meant finding the eigenvectors of this matrix. In this thread, I'll review our result and bits of 170 years of history
*J.F. van Diejen, Talca
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The title of our paper is "Elliptic Kac–Sylvester Matrix from Difference Lamé Equation" and it was recently published in the mathematical physics journal Annales Henri Poincaré.
Just to "name-drop" some of the characters that will appear in the story: Sylvester (duh), Jacobi, Boltzmann, two Ehrenfests, Schrödinger and Kac (obvs).
(I'll expand the thread over several days so please be patient.)
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"Here's a photo of my boy, Peter. He doesn't yet know what the continuum is, but he doesn't know what fascism is either." - George Szekeres' message to Paul Erdős.
Peter Szekeres was born in Shanghai, where his parents George Szekeres and Esther Klein escaped from Nazi persecution in 1938.
Happy Ending Theorem: any set of five points in the plane in general position has a subset of four points that form the vertices of a convex quadrilateral.
Erdős gave this name to the theorem, because it led to the marriage of Szekeres and Klein
As a run-up to the "Introduction to Integrability" series (see my pinned tweet), I decided to share some interesting bits from the history of integrable systems.
Let's start at the beginning, shall we? So Newton...
#1 It all started with Newton solving the gravitational 2-body problem and deriving Kepler's laws of planetary motion as a result. I would argue that this was possible, because the Kepler problem is (super)integrable. [1/2]
This roughly means that there are many conversed physical quantities like energy, angular momentum, and the Laplace-Runge-Lenz vector. These conservation laws restrict the motion and allow for explicit analytic solutions of otherwise difficult equations. [2/2]