A Day’s Adventure in Math Wonderland:

Fat Triangles & Flattened Bagels

Title: The Wonders of Math

Mathematics has been known to be one the most complex things to be

discovered on earth. It would often be perceived as boring, hard, and just a waste of
time. However, we have not seen math on its finest. We haven’t had the chance to
understand it fully because we already have this thinking that math is a subject, we
already regret thinking of it in the first place. In this chapter, you would find math is not
that bad at all. If you think about it, it mostly consists of just a bunch of different shapes
and of course, how those shapes can be applied to real life situations.

The story started with young boys who loathed math as they thought it was a
waste of time. However, the boys thought they would give it a try and go to Math
Wonderland to see if it is really fun. A young woman named Keiko, greeted 3 boys by
the door. The first boy, Kino, said that Keiko has strange wheels that look like bagels
flattened along the edges. Meanwhile, Ichiro adds that a fat triangle shape seems to be
turning inside the square at the center of the wheels. Jai also added that the fat triangle
touches every part of the square as the wheels turn while observing it. Keiko took the 3
young boys to get the other skates and they skated through the second floor going
directly to the exhibit room. In the exhibit room, they found objects that look like fat
triangles and flattened bagels which would represent as curves of constant width.

On one corner, a miniature manhole and a cover both in fat triangle shapes,
round, square, triangular, and trapezoidal can be seen. The three young men moved
the covers around by each handling one shape and then another. Jai chooses the
square manhole and cover and observed that the cover falls in. He said that the side is
shorter than the diagonal so if he moves the cover in another way, it falls in. While Ichiro
and Kino are observing, Ichiro professed that the triangle and trapezoid also fall in, but
not the circle and the fat triangle. On this note, this is because the circle has the
property that it has constant width. No matter which way you turn the circular lid, there is
no danger of it falling into the manhole. According to Martin Gardner, author of “The
Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classical puzzles, paradoxes, and problems,” he
defines a curve of constant width to be a convex planar shape whose width, which can
be measured by the distance between two opposite parallel lines touching its boundary,
is the same regardless of the direction of the lines. He also defined the width of the
curve in a given direction to be the perpendicular distance between the parallel lines.
On the other hand, Kino inquires on the specialty about those two shapes. The tour
guide who was left in charge of that room named Koji, answered that the shapes are
bounded by curves of constant width.
 Koji rolled several shapes between two parallel lines and showed that the circle
and the Reuleaux triangle touch both lines all the time as they roll along, while the
square does not. The Reuleaux Triangle is the most common curve of constant width,
other than the circle. This curve was developed by Franz Reuleaux, an engineer who is
considered to be the father of modern kinematics. The shapes of constant width will roll
smoothly along a flat surface just like how smoothly the skates move. Koji also added
that the reuleaux concept extends to pentagons, heptagons and so on while showing a
frame containing a coin from Bermuda shaped like a Reuleaux triangle, and an old
British coin shaped like a Reuleaux heptagon.

In the other part of the room is a sign that particularly says, “SQUARE HOLE”.
Koji announced that this incredible machine makes square holes. However, the three
young men seemed skeptical about it and so Koji suggested that they should hold a
piece of foam against the blade to test the so-called machine. The movement started
from the top left to right, then down the right side, and when they reach the bottom, they
move from right to left and then back to the top, just like the movement of the fat triangle
in the skates. As they move, they touch every point on the boundary of the square
except for the very corner points. There were other types of machine that produced
shapes such as hexagonal hole and so on. One thing that Jai came up to the realization
with is that it will take a fat heptagon blade to make an octagonal hole and so on.
 Koji leads them to another machine which is known to be a rotary combustion
engine that we typically find in cars. In the capsule it can be seen that there is another
fat triangle to be found. Koji explained that the capsule is called the bore of the engine
and that Reuleaux triangle inside the bore is a rotor. The shape of the capsule is based
on an epitrochoid curve. This curve is formed by tracing the midpoint of a radius of a
circle as it moves around the circumference of another circle with twice its diameter. Koji
also stated that the three vertices of the rotor touch the bore at three points creating
three chambers. As the rotor turns, each of the chambers alternately expands and
contracts. The process mostly involves intake, compression, combustion, and exhaust.
He concluded that combustion creates power that makes the car move.

Overall, mathematics
is simply just about expanding your wide
range of understanding on things. It is applied in
our daily lives without even knowing it. It has been
made for the improvement of civilization and to make life easier, of course. An example
would be the manhole. If we didn’t know mathematics in the first place, we would be
stuck with square-shaped manholes for all eternity. We wouldn’t know why the square
shaped cover keeps on falling down when you turn it on another side. Mathematics is a
gift, and we should explore more about the wonders of what it has to offer.

Sources:
Paciotti, L. (2014). Curves of Constant Width and their Shadows. Retrieved from
https://www.whitman.edu/Documents/Academics/Mathematics/SeniorProject_LuciaPaci
otti.pdf
Akiyama, J., Ruiz, M. (2008). A Day’s Adventure in Math Wonderland. Retrieved
from https://www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/6864