Wedding Dress Trains: What a drag!!!!

  Attention all mathspigs.

 There is a lot of maths in weddings including how are you going to pay for the damn thing.

 But Mathspig became interested in Kate’s Wedding Dress train.

 I mean how hard is it to drag a wedding train down the red carpet at the Royal Wedding.

Unfortunately, there was no data available for coefficent of friction of silk on wool carpet. 

Mathspig did her own experiment to come up with a drag coefficient (See details at the end of the post).

2011 Kate’s Wedding  Train = 2.7 m/8ft 10 in

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1986 Sarah Ferguson’s  Train =  5.2m / 17 ft

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1981 Diana’s Wedding  Train = 7.62 m / 25 ft

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1947 Princess Elizabeth Train = 4 m / 13ft 1 in

(Now Queen Elizabeth. Wedding Dress below)

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Dragging that bridal train down the Red Carpet!!!!

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As you can see (below) it takes some effort to drag those wedding dress trains.

If the train is TOO HEAVY it is hard work for the bride (See Diana below) walking up the steps.

IF it is TOO LIGHT it can blow up in the wind like a yacht sail and carry the bride off.

If it is TOO SLIPPERY then coming down the steps the train will just keep going and bundle up at the brides feet.

Some trains are wider than 1 m like Kate’s so the drag would be even higher. Some red carpets are narrow. Nevertheless, these calculations are a good approximation.
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Some Brides over do the train.

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.As an 8 year old boy weighs around 24 kg some long trains would equal dragging a short train down the aisle with the page boy sitting on it for a ride.

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According to OK magazine  the longest wedding dress train measured over 2488 m or 8,164 feet and was created by Lichel van den Ende. It was presented and measured in Zoetermeer, The Netherlands, on December 22, 2009.

UPDATE: 21 March 2012 ABCNEWS

According to the ABC News, Romania has set a new World Record for Wedding train length. The 1.85-mile ( 3 km) long ivory train was modeled by Ema Dumitrescu, who appeared in a hot air balloon floating over Bucharest. The Guinness Book of World Records officially named the train the longest one in the world. It required 15,420 feet of taffeta, 18 feet of lace and 147 feet of lining. 

NOTE for Science Students: Mathspig used 4 m square of silk shantung  folded into 1 m square and weighing 375 kg. She then dragged this square down her own carpet and recorded the drag on kitchen scales in gram. The drag per m square was 450 gm or 0.45 kg. The difference between static and kinetic friction was minimal because the brides walk is not smooth.

Then Mathspig used 2m square of silk folded to form 1m square. It weighed 180gm and had a drag per m of 200 gm. This seemed too light for a wedding train.

Easter Egg Maths

Mathspig can’t stop thinking about EASTER EGGS.

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How do you do you  graph  an Easter Egg?

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Fortunately, Jurgen Koller @ the fab mathematische-basteleien website has already solved the problem.

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Start with an Oval.

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To change it to an egg shape multiply  y or y² by  t(x), so that y becomes larger on the right side of the y-axis and smaller on the left side.

y(x=0) must not be changed. 

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The equation of the ellipse:

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e.g. x²/9+y²/4=1

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BECOMES

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x²/9+y²/4*t(x)=1.

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Three examples:

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Now plot in chocolate paint and eat graph. Yum!!!

According to Jurgen Koller, Don M. Jacobs, M.D, Daly City, USA developed a nice egg shape by changing the circle equation x²+y²=1 a little: x² + [1.4^x*1.6y]² = 1.

The egg equation is an exponential equation of type t3 above. This shows this conversion:

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Thanks, Jurgen. I wonder if he’s an Egghead!!!!!!

Every Day is Pi Day

Wowwwwwwwwww!!!!!!

π   π   π

Mathspig is very excited to note that Pi has been in the news this week.

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Firstly, in an article titled Pimp My Memory New Scientist, 2nd April, cited Chao Lu’s feat of remembering π to 67,890 places in November 2005.

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It took Chao (pictured below) 24 hours and 4 minutes to recite the 67,000plus places!!!!!!!!

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If Mathspig was listening I dare say she would have fallen asleep and slammed her snout into the table top at 200kph at about the 300th decimal place.

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But I can’t help wondering what would happen if some one said, Aussie style ‘Nah, mate! You missed one. That 61, 235 place was a 3!!!!!’

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This is more a feat of memory than maths.

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Wowwwwww !!!!^2!!!!

Then The New Yorker, 4th April 2011, reported on Pi Day activities in the Facing History School (pictured ), Hell’s Kitchen, NY. (Below random students)

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Maths teachers held a pi-memorisation day on Pi Day (3/14 in USA, which unfortunately in Australia is written 14/3) offering a new iPod Touch as a prize.

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There was also a pi pie-eating contest and a pi “jeopardy” game.  The Maths teachers all wore Pi Day teachers with names printed on the back such as Karina “The Algorithm” Garcia.

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The winner of the pi-memorisation was a sophomore (Year 10 in Australia), Jason Gil, who recalled 162 digits. Yey!!! Go Jason.

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Mathspig urges maths teachers to have a fun maths day. Other subjects have days and events!!! Give maths a big profile in your school. A Pi Day is good. And a pi-memorisation challenge can be lots of fun. Here are three ways to remember Pi.

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1.Phone No. Method

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Some students at Facing History School, NY committed  the pi sequence to memory by putting the numbers in blocks of cellphone numbers.

3.1415926535 8979323846 2643383279 5028841971

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2. Song Method

The Pi sequence can be remembered using a Pi Song.  Here’s a song to recall the first 10 digits.

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If numbers had a heaven

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Their God would surely be

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3.1415

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92653

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It is sung to the Mickey Mouse Club Song.

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Here is a more entertaining song called Mathematical Pi Song by 4ACT, which proves that good mathematicians make crap singers.

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3. Piem Method

The third way to memorise the pi sequence is to write a PIEM … or Pi Poem.

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It can be a crazy poem but each word has the number of letters of the digit to be remembered.

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eg.

How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics.

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Here’s a piem by Maths pig:

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Get a grip u maths pyschopath I’m afraid piday fun shidz students painfully.

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All right, already. Some poetic license is allowed. Tricks such as rhymes and mnemonics like the piem will only help memory if they are witty and apt but you must know what you can get away with.

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How to study for exams? According to studies reported in New Scientist the best way to learn for an exam is to constantly test your memory. Make it work hard. REcall. REcall. REcall.

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I’m Mathspig. I didn’t say I would be a nice pig.