Customer comments on this selection.
 Pursuit Problems
Suppose you are given a problem which says: "Three dogs are placed at the vertices of an equilateral triangle; they run one after the other. What is the curve described by each of them?" How would you solve the problem? If this makes you scratch your head a little, don't worry. This problem actually appeared on the Cambridge University Mathematical Tripos Examination in 1871 and is one of the so-called "n-bug" problem. Obviously when n goes to infinity, the curve of each bug becomes a circle. On p. 110, Professor Nahin started to analyze this problem by writing down the radial and transverse components of the velocity, and step-by-step, he showed us how to solve this seemingly complicated problem, yet only elementary calculus (and perhaps some college physics) is needed. The approach is elegant. This book, which has a subtitle of The Mathematics of Pursuit and Evasion, obviously has a lot of mathematics and many equations, and it is not for general readers who are afraid of math. However, the book provides many elegant pursuit problems with military applications. For those who enjoy the real applications of calculus and perhaps like do some calculations on the back of an envelope, this is a superb book.
|
