Remember that Bozo the Clown punching bag you had when you were a kid? You'd punch it, and punch it, and punch it and it would still pop back up ready for more. Of course, it relied on a base that was filled with lots of sand to tip it back into position. Well, now...

"Mathematicians Gábor Domokos of the Budapest Institute of Technology and Economics and Péter Várkonyi of Princeton University...[have created a shape where the shape of the object alone is] enough to pull it upright".



"The mathematicians still face an unanswered question. The self-righting objects they've found have been smooth and curvy. They wonder if it's possible to create a self-righting polyhedral object, which would have flat sides. They think it is probably possible, but they haven't yet managed to find such an object. So, they are offering a prize to the first person to find one: $10,000, divided by the number of sides of the polyhedron."

http://blog.sciencenews.org/mathtrek/200......own.html

By the way, Mother Nature is, once again, way ahead of us on this one. The same researchers have discovered that some turtles' shells are shaped very similarly to their engineered object.

That's interesting.

I love how they've set up the prize amount. I don't think it would be possible to win more than a grand?

THe answer should be solvable (well at least testable) using trig, volume and moments.

Actually would momentum come into it aswell?

You could prbably create something similair to the shape above but with 10,000 flat sides and win yourself a dollar.
George