the math behind a skipping stone

This is exactly why I loathed mathematics and put in zero effort to learn it.

Out of all the subjects, mathematics was the one where I earned a big fat D every single report card.
 

I have a tested IQ of 136 but the guy I copied the equations from had a tad bit higher. and yes this is the resulting math for a skipping stone, used to figure out what happens to an airplane when it lands or crashes on water!!
 
I studied engineering at university, and was dismayed to find that engineering mainly consisted of maths. It took a long time to sink in, but after a while I came to see a sort of 'beauty' in it.
After uni, I got a job as a large systems engineer with IBM. On the first day of education, we were asked who had degrees. A number of hands went up, and then the instructor said, "Forget it".

Occasionally, I try to remember how to solve some maths problems, just to see if I can do it.
 
who is going to use all this math? or better still the one I have not posted yet on walking. walking? now there is a good subject. the angles of the upper/lower leg, the angle of the ankle/foot. so why would you need it? to figure out what part of a pair of shoes would wear out the fastest and to either build in obsolence where it wore out the most or build in strength so it would not wear so fast....
land a plane of water and what part will collapse first and kill the occupants or strengthen that part to aid in survivability! to bad they didnt do that with the titanic.....
 
cdestroyer said:
who is going to use all this math? or better still the one I have not posted yet on walking. walking? now there is a good subject. the angles of the upper/lower leg, the angle of the ankle/foot. so why would you need it? to figure out what part of a pair of shoes would wear out the fastest and to either build in obsolence where it wore out the most or build in strength so it would not wear so fast....
land a plane of water and what part will collapse first and kill the occupants or strengthen that part to aid in survivability! to bad they didnt do that with the titanic.....
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I'm definitely not into math. However, for those who don't seem to see the need of it, let me ask if you like your GPS's. In order for them to work, someone has to take into consideration both the General and Special Theories of Relativity -- and there's plenty of math there. Be thankful to those mathematicians!
 
oh no irwin you really want me to go deeper into the math? the rest of this forum will shun us,,,ha ha ha
 
Queen you also have to take into account spatial reference, space is not flat, it is curved. so in a flat plane there are only 180 degrees in a triangle 90,45,45... but in curved space there are 90,90,90 = 270...the lines of lagitude meet at the equater in 90 degrees to the next line along the equater at 90 degrees and then to the north pole at 90 degrees, earth is curved... gps systems have to take that into account also..or else you could be someplace not on the line..
 
cdestroyer said:
oh no irwin you really want me to go deeper into the math? the rest of this forum will shun us,,,ha ha ha
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Math used to be like solving puzzles for me, so it was fun and it was easy; I guess it was fun because it was easy. (I'm equating solving math problems to puzzle solving, so that would make me an "equater." :) )

I got 'A's in every math exam I've ever taken except the ones where I had to memorize a bunch of theorems, which I didn't feel like doing. I'm not good at memorizing. I used to sit right in the front row, right in front of the professor when we had an exam so he or she wouldn't think I had cheated.

I've used quite a bit of algebra, geometry, and trig at various jobs, but never anything higher than that and after, what, 25 years since I graduated, I've forgotten most of what I haven't used. I guess it would come back pretty quickly if I had to use it again, but that's not how I want to spend my retirement. :ROFLMAO:
 
irwin, according to the guy who actually did the math, the downward pressure is enough to overcome friction and added in force against the water to make the stone bounce, losing forward momentum but over coming the friction..er eh something like that..
 
cdestroyer said:
irwin, according to the guy who actually did the math, the downward pressure is enough to overcome friction and added in force against the water to make the stone bounce, losing forward momentum but over coming the friction..er eh something like that..
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I just did some intensive research to find out what makes a stone skip on water. (I Googled it.)

What happens is, as the stone exerts downward force on the water, some of the water is displaced, which causes a wave to be formed, and when the stone hits that wave, it's propelled back into the air, like when Evel Knievel hit the ramp on his motorcycle.

Friction from the water is going to slow it down some each time it hits until it no longer gets launched back into the air and it sinks.

I have no idea what the formula would look like to calculate it.
 
dunno bout that one ohiboy but a deck of cards dealt to 7 players has more combinations than seconds since time began. wanna look into something amazing google hypercube
 
@cdestroyer, I was thinking about how to calculate this problem, and it would be much like calculating how far a ski jumper would jump if instead of just one jump, there would be a series of jumps, and the height of the jumps would be relative to the skier's velocity. Factor in the coefficient of friction and when there was insufficient velocity for the skier to overcome the gravitational pull, that's when it would stop. You'd use vectors and matrices and mathy stuff like that for the calculation, which I have no intention of doing. :ROFLMAO:
 

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