illuminating science

If you thought mathematics wasn’t important, you haven’t met Dr Polster, a researcher from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He’s done a rigorous mathematical analysis to show that if you have a wobbly table, simply rotating it around its centre point - no more folded bits of paper under one leg! It’s based on an old but elegant proof for a square table, generalised to a rectangular table (with four legs - a three legged table rarely wobbles!)

Of course, there are so minor, technical details - the ground can’t be “too wild” (no more than about a 33 degree change in angle, and the table’s legs need to be at least half as long as its diagonal (basically, this may not apply for a short coffee table, but will be fine for a pool table!) And, of course, the resulting table won’t be level anymore - so it’s probably, in fact, not such a good solution for playing pool. But provided your ground is only mildly wonky, it’s probably not such an issue! His online paper paper is actually quite readable - I think that a confident senior high school student could probably work through a lot of it (although I haven’t read it all, yet!)

Pretty neat, I think!