You can make wheels of different shapes and compensating tracks so that the axle height remains constant, but the wheels don't turn with constant angular velocity when the axle move with constant speed. Since the wheels have rotational inertia the vehicle will experience oscillating forward motion. Brent Meeker On 7/17/2015 5:46 PM, rwg wrote:
On 2015-07-17 09:05, James Propp wrote:
The essay is now live, at https://mathenchant.wordpress.com/2015/07/15/the-lessons-of-a-square-wheeled... .
(I removed the calculations that initially gave me trouble; I eventually got them to come out right, but I couldn't muster much enthusiasm for them, so I figured my readers wouldn't either.)
Comments are welcome, especially those that I might be able to apply in future columns. The intended audience is the sort of people who read Martin Gardner's column.
Jim Propp ___________ Couldn't you make a trike with a square front wheel, and respectively three-cornered (convex?) and five-cornered (concave?) rear wheels with curved sides? Maybe all the corners could be right angles. --rwg
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