This new form like the pyramid always goes to the ground with the same side
In 2023, Domokos – along with his graduate students Gergő Almádi and Krisztina Regős, and Robert Dawson of the University of St. Mary in Canada – thought it was really possible to distribute quadrilateral weight to sit on only one face. At least in theory.
But Almodi, Dawson, and Dosocus wanted to do it, a task that became much more challenging than they expected. Now, in a printing house that was posted online yesterday, they have offered the first physical model of work. This quadrilateral weighs 120 grams and measures 50 cm on its longest side, made of light carbon fiber and compact tungsten carbide. To work, it must be engineered at one level of one -tenth gram and one tenth of a millimeter to a level of engineering accuracy. But the final construction is always on a face exactly as it should be on one face.
This shows the important role of experimentation and play in the research mathematics. The program also has potential practical applications, such as the design of the suicide spacecraft.
Pope said “I didn’t expect more to do more on Tetrahedra.” And yet, he added, the team’s research allows mathematicians to “really appreciate how much we didn’t know and how complete our understanding is.”
The top point
In 2022, al -Modi, then a master who wishes to become an architect, enrolled in the Domokos mechanics. He did not say much, but Domocus saw a hard -working worker in him who was constantly in deep thought. At the end of the semester, Dumokus asked him to discover a simple algorithm to discover how Tetrahedra balances.
When Conway initially raised his problem, his only option to use pencil and paper to prove, through abstract mathematical reasoning, is that Tetrahedra is acceptable. It will be almost difficult to identify a prominent example. But Almodi had a computer decades later. He could have done a cruel search through a large number of possible forms. Finally, the Almidi program found the coordinates of four four -sided four -sided that can be used if a specific weight distribution is allocated. Conway was right.
Al -Madi found a portable quadrilateral, but there were probably other people. What are the characteristics?
Although this may seem like a simple question, the “sentence is” a quadrilateral “cannot be easily described with a simple formula or a small set of equations.”
The team realized that in all portable four -sided, three consecutive edges (where the pairs of faces are together) need to create boring angles – things that measure over 90 degrees. This ensures that one face will hang on the other and allow it to be tip.
The mathematicians then showed that if the center of the mass is in one of the four “loading” zones, all four of them can be made in Monostable. As long as the center of the mass is located in a loading zone, the quadrilateral will only be balanced in one case.
