Professor Nishiyama: King of Science - The Mathematics of Egg Shape

I was delighted to see a comment on my Boomerang article by none other than Professor Yutaka Nishiyama. I like that I'm the kind of person who has a blog that attracts comments from Japanese professors. I was slightly less pleased that I'd made a second-rate joke about the Japanese language and he didn't pick up on it being a joke. I actually felt embarrassed about that. But I'm chuffed silly that he links to my article on his blog.

But it's Easter (well, it was) and I've had a bit of a run of egg-related posts. And guess who wrote a paper about the mathematics of eggs? None other than my favourite scientist: Professor Nishiyama.

Nishiyama has devised a mathematical formula (using the work of Descartes and Cassini) to describe the shape of eggs and their properties, such as how they roll on an inclined surface. As always, the paper is concise and very easy to read. The Professor also encourages you to carry out your own experimentation:

"I'd like for those readers who have until now had no interest in the shape of eggs to begin by confirming this experimentally."

Read the paper (in English) here:
http://www.osaka-ue.ac.jp/zemi/nishiyama/math2010/egg.pdf

Via: http://www.neatorama.com/2012/03/26/why-are-eggs-egg-shaped/

Professor Nishiyama: King of Science - Boomerangs

Oh boy. When I was looking up Professor Yutaka Nishiyama's "plofile" for that finger counting article the other day, I noticed that the picture showed a shitload of boomerangs in the background. Well, bugger me, but the Prof's written an article on boomerangs.

Yeah, it turns out that Nishiyama is the Honorary Director of the Japanese Boomerang Association and he totally knows how boomerangs stay in the air, so click on to find out in comprehensive, yet surprisingly concise detail how gyroscopics, the Bernoulli principle, angular precession and inertial moments make a magical bent stick come back. Interestingly enough "boomerang" is a Japanese compound word where "boom" means "to go" and "er-ang" means "to come back"... as far as you know.

http://www.osaka-ue.ac.jp/zemi/nishiyama/math2010/boomerang.pdf

But that's not all. Some lesser professors (I'm looking at you, Alexander S. Kuleshov) might stop at explaining the flight characteristics of non-disposable branches, but Professor Nishiyama has come up with a boomerang design that will create world peace and he's translated it into seventy different languages. Suck on that, Dr Hugh Hunt. Die in a fire, Associate Professor Richard Kelso. And that's why Nishiyama is Professor of Awesome at Hell Yeah University. So click the link and print ten billion of these at work tomorrow - don't worry about what your boss says; it's for world peace so it's fine.

http://www.kbn3.com/bip/index2.html

Ha ha ha ha! Ah ha ha! Oh wait, world peace. Right. Sorry

Nishiyama actually has book about why eggs are egg-shaped and why the number five exists, but sadly they're not available in English yet. But he does have a paper on the mathematics of stairway light switches so stay tuned for that little beauty.