We have 22 chickens (various ages). In the summer, we get 18 eggs a day.
Then real world is not so neat and easily described. I'm sure theres simple formulas to describe the shape of most eggs, but I've seen things that were not simple.
Occasionally there will be an egg with an indented ring. Sometimes they will be asymmetrical in both axes. We're pretty sure its one of the older chickens will drop eggs with incomplete shells; where does that fit in the mathematicians' world?
"We can ignore these statistical outliers, this is pure math!" ... Great and wonderful until you bring the math back to the real world, and it fails to work for those cases excluded from consideration in the theoretical stage.
My whole rant is irrelevant until someday, someone is trying to figure out why their egg collector robot keeps smashing 3% of the yield.
I was expecting that the press release is exaggerating the claims in the paper, but the research paper says:
> This mathematical analysis and description represents the sought-for universal formula and is a significant step in understanding not only the egg shape itself, but also how and why it evolved, thus making widespread biological and technological applications theoretically possible.
As a 100% mathematician and 50% physicist, I think the claim is ridiculous.
(I was expecting a research paper that finds the stronger egg-shaped surface with some parameters. It looks like an interesting and perhaps difficult problem. The claiming that they got the "universal formula" is unbelievable.)
(Perhaps the math inside the paywalled paper is solid. Abstracts and Introductions many times have small exaggerations. This is too much for me.)
Then real world is not so neat and easily described. I'm sure theres simple formulas to describe the shape of most eggs, but I've seen things that were not simple.
Occasionally there will be an egg with an indented ring. Sometimes they will be asymmetrical in both axes. We're pretty sure its one of the older chickens will drop eggs with incomplete shells; where does that fit in the mathematicians' world?
"We can ignore these statistical outliers, this is pure math!" ... Great and wonderful until you bring the math back to the real world, and it fails to work for those cases excluded from consideration in the theoretical stage.
My whole rant is irrelevant until someday, someone is trying to figure out why their egg collector robot keeps smashing 3% of the yield.