hogjack
Permanent Pause
- Joined
- Jul 28, 2002
- Posts
- 35,617
Mathematicians to the rescue of the unraveled shoelaces amongst us. That means you, Olivianna. Oh, and me, too.
We can't tie our damned shoes
Mathematician finds it's knot easy to tie shoes
December 31, 2002 Chicago Sun-Times
If you're the kind of person whose shoelaces always unravel, new research from Australia could change your life.
Mathematician Burkard Polster not only has figured out the best way to tie shoelaces but the best method for lacing shoes. His research can be found in the December issue of Nature.
Polster's real job is not analyzing shoelaces, but creating abstract mathematical universes, a task that has trained him to see patterns in everything he observes.
One of his observations is that there are 400 million ways to lace a shoe with six pairs of eyelets.
After solving a lot of complex equations, Polster found the typical crisscross pattern most of us use is the strongest pattern.
But as far as tying your shoes, he concluded there is a great deal of room for improvement.
"Hundreds of years of trial and error have led to the strongest way of lacing our shoes, but unfortunately the same cannot be said about the way most of us tie our shoelaces," said Polster, who works at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.
The problem is that most of us use a variation of the "granny knot," considered a notoriously unstable knot by Boy Scouts and sailors alike, Polster said.
For a right-handed person this usually means the left lace is passed over and then under the right lace for the first knot, and then the left lace again is wrapped over and under a loop formed by the right lace.
This is repeating the exact same knot twice and is essentially piling two weak knots on top each other, according to Polster.
But there's an easy fix--just reverse one of the knots.
"Instead of doing left over right for the first knot, do right over the left," Polster said. "Then do the loop part unchanged."
Even though this knot is far better than a granny knot, it is still prone to slip a little--and so it's not perfect either.
For those seeking the ultimate shoelace knot, Polster recommends a further variation: Instead of wrapping the laces once around each other for each stage of the knot, do it twice.
This knot is good enough for surgeons, so it ought to do for shoelaces, Polster said.
Polster, who put himself through school working as a street performer, occasionally juggles balls in the classroom to demonstrate mathematical principals. He believes real world examples of math in action, like determining the best way to lace shoes, can get young people interested in mathematics.
"I can look at the hair on your head and, without counting it, I can tell you that there are at least two other people in Chicago with exactly the same number of hairs on their heads," said Polster.
"It's really beautiful stuff, there's really no end to it, but we don't have enough good teachers to get this stuff across."
Nature
We can't tie our damned shoes
Mathematician finds it's knot easy to tie shoes
December 31, 2002 Chicago Sun-Times
If you're the kind of person whose shoelaces always unravel, new research from Australia could change your life.
Mathematician Burkard Polster not only has figured out the best way to tie shoelaces but the best method for lacing shoes. His research can be found in the December issue of Nature.
Polster's real job is not analyzing shoelaces, but creating abstract mathematical universes, a task that has trained him to see patterns in everything he observes.
One of his observations is that there are 400 million ways to lace a shoe with six pairs of eyelets.
After solving a lot of complex equations, Polster found the typical crisscross pattern most of us use is the strongest pattern.
But as far as tying your shoes, he concluded there is a great deal of room for improvement.
"Hundreds of years of trial and error have led to the strongest way of lacing our shoes, but unfortunately the same cannot be said about the way most of us tie our shoelaces," said Polster, who works at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.
The problem is that most of us use a variation of the "granny knot," considered a notoriously unstable knot by Boy Scouts and sailors alike, Polster said.
For a right-handed person this usually means the left lace is passed over and then under the right lace for the first knot, and then the left lace again is wrapped over and under a loop formed by the right lace.
This is repeating the exact same knot twice and is essentially piling two weak knots on top each other, according to Polster.
But there's an easy fix--just reverse one of the knots.
"Instead of doing left over right for the first knot, do right over the left," Polster said. "Then do the loop part unchanged."
Even though this knot is far better than a granny knot, it is still prone to slip a little--and so it's not perfect either.
For those seeking the ultimate shoelace knot, Polster recommends a further variation: Instead of wrapping the laces once around each other for each stage of the knot, do it twice.
This knot is good enough for surgeons, so it ought to do for shoelaces, Polster said.
Polster, who put himself through school working as a street performer, occasionally juggles balls in the classroom to demonstrate mathematical principals. He believes real world examples of math in action, like determining the best way to lace shoes, can get young people interested in mathematics.
"I can look at the hair on your head and, without counting it, I can tell you that there are at least two other people in Chicago with exactly the same number of hairs on their heads," said Polster.
"It's really beautiful stuff, there's really no end to it, but we don't have enough good teachers to get this stuff across."
Nature
