AT LAST!!! Age OLD Ballistic question answered!!!

[BossHoss]

http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/05/27/german-teen-solves-300-year-old-mathematical-riddle-posed-by-sir-isaac-newton/?intcmp=obnetwork

Gotta get this factored into reloading data programs...

[fecmech]

That's great. Now maybe battleships firing at other ships 10-15 miles away can hit them!

[gofastman]

That was one of the most poorly written articles I have ever read!

"German boy is a genus,
BLAH BLAH BLAH, filler filler filler
the end"

I want my time back fox news!

[DonMountain]

Thats funny. This sounds exactly like the problem I solved in a high school calculus class. In fact, I think we all did in the class. Elementary physics. And my daughter must be a genious too. She had to solve the same problem? And my uncle worked in the engine room of a destroyer when I was in high school and they directed the "big guns" using a simple program on a hand held Hulitt-Packard calculator. Bad article! :bigsmyl2:

[Lead Fred]

Lets see, boolit starts here, and ends there.

Guess We didnt bother to write anything down

[turbo1889]

The only thing I can think of is that maybe he figured out a way to exactly describe how the BC changes slightly in flight. It has been known for a long time that BC is not a true constant.

I agree that the article was extremely poorly written and insulting to the reader since it gave absolutely none of the actual math information. So either they are insulting us by not showing us the actual math involved or the reporter is so stupid that he can't even understand it even enough to figure out how to copy and past the relevant info into his article. Or it could be both. I strongly suspect that is the case. The more online news articles I read from the more I find that the current crop of reporters are among the most stupid, arrogant, and condescending individuals alive.

[303Guy]

They hadn't figured it out before? I wonder how they got those space capsules down?:roll:
When I tried to find out how to work it out no-one could tell me other than that it was some algorithm. I just didn't know who to ask.

[220swiftfn]

Like the card I got my son for his HS graduation......

If a hen and a half lays an egg and a half every day and a half, how long does it take a grasshopper with a wooden leg to kick all the seeds out of a dill pickle?
























....I don't know either, but aren't you glad that wasn't on the final???



Dan

[41 mag fan]

Too bad it wasn't a U.S. student who figured it out.

[BossHoss]

Too bad it wasn't a U.S. student who figured it out.


Exactly my thoughts, too:?



Yes, it was terribly written, but....

this is / was the last variable unable to be quanitfied with it's own factors.


Yes, there have been accurate methods of trajectory management, all "work arounds", if you will , that were reasonably, arguably, near perfect.

THIS makes it possible to quanitfy,verify those methods......right?

Very cool.

Hey Newton!!!! Hope you are having an Ale with the "boys".

[1bluehorse]

If he's the only one who knows the answers, who checked his work....:kidding:

[MtGun44]

He most probably came up with an exact, closed form solution to a differential equation
that has been unsolved for a long time.

The reason this is relatively unimportant from a practical standpoint is that, since so many
different problems have no known closed form solution for the differential equations, that
we have developed many different "arbitrarily accurate" approximate methods to solve
for solutions to these 'diffy Qs' so that we can get an approximate solution to whatever
accuracy you desire. You just need more effort in the calculation to get increased acc'y. With
digital computers, the accuracy is whatever you can afford as far as computer power and
time are available.

So - interesting mathematically, but from a practical standpoint a total yawner. There are
literally thousands and thousands of specific problems in physics where the exact differential
or integral equation that precisely defines the problem has been well known for decades
or even centuries, but there was no closed form general solution known. Many have been
solved for "special cases" like for irrotational flow, or for constant air density or in a vacuum,
or some other limited subset where the limiting assumption makes the equations simpler
and they can be solved.

Using finite element analysis, most problems have yielded to supercomputer power in fields
like structures, crash testing, etc. I have a friend working on a complete simulation of the
manufacture, assembly and firing of a rifle cartridge for a large company. VERY cool simulation,
I wish I were on the project.

Cars crash much safer, turbine engine internal airflow is massively improved, and many other
things are much better engineered using "arbitrarily accurate approximate methods of solution".

Smart kid, but no real practical benefit.

Bill

[462]

Hmmm . . . prior to this kid's solution, we were able place a 2400-pound, 16-inch naval round within mere yards of its intended target, from 20+ miles away, and send men to the moon and back.

Reminds me of Lee's handgun Carbide Factory Crimp Die -- a solution to a non-existent problem.

I'm not saying the kid ain't smart.

[303Guy]

MtGun44, you're an interesting man.:drinks:

[soldierbilly1]

It's not that important.

Can he come to the US and figure how to create a couple of jobs?

hah!
billy boy

[H.Callahan]

Does that mean all my guns will now shoot into one caliber sized hole at 2,000 yards?

[dakotashooter2]

WOMH :groner:

[Echo]

Great response, Bill.

[jonk]

I don't get what's so revolutionary here. In high school physics I did the same thing- figure the trajectory of a bullet, arrow, whatever, taking into account given gravity for a given elevation, angle of incidence, torque of the rifling if applicable, wind, and coefficient of friction of air at a given barometric pressure. If you know all this, it's actually pretty simple as I recall, and while I can't do it offhand, give me 5 minutes to review the formulas and I'll happily work it out by hand for you.

[303Guy]

He didn't use formulae, neither did he work out the trajectory of a bullet for the first time in history. He worked out the mathematical equation for the first time - so they are saying. Have another look at MtGun44's post, he explains it rather well, I thought.

[geargnasher]

It's not that important.

Can he come to the US and figure how to create a couple of jobs?

hah!
billy boy

That's easy, no genius required: Eliminate 90% of taxpayer-funded positions including about the same percentage of legal statutes, replace 100% of the current politicians (except for a certain Arizona sheriff, he gets to be the new prez), and in a year business will be booming again.

Good post, MtGun, my eternal frustration with higher math was that the more complex the problems became, the more arbitrary the solutions. I loved the math of physics right up to the point that we started having to figure relativity into everything to be accurate. Four hour tests with two problems to solve got pretty nerve-wracking, too. My hat's off to the people who can truly grasp this stuff.

Gear

[MtGun44]

This is the difference between a mathematician and an engineer. An engineer needs to solve
a particular problem well enough to accurately predict if an airplane will fly safely, a bridge
stand up, a car crash in a way to protect the occupants, or an artillery shell hit where you
want it to hit. A pure mathematician may or may not care about the real application, many
are interested primarily in the 'beauty' of the mathematics. Personally, it is a tool for me
to do my job.

So - you start out doing testing and writing equations to predict what will happen outside
of the area where you actually have tested. Somewhere in the mix, a mathematician (very
smart folks, but some are practically oriented and some are not) or a smart engineer that
learned calculus in college can sit down and write a differential or integral equation which
describes the behavior of the particular problem being examined. If there is a known solution
to that differential equation, the you apply the actual conditions and get the exact answer.

The problem is that huge numbers of scientific fields have been able to write the exact
equation that describes what you are working with, but you cannot solve it for useful
situations. You can only solve it for zero speed, or for in a vacuum (no air effects) or if
the object is spherical, or some other "simplifying assumption" that makes some of the
difficulties of solving the equation drop out.

Eventually, engineers got sick of being able to write equations that could not be solved,
so they decided to work on approximations. Lots of smart mathematicians and engineers
worked out how to do approximate solutions for these equations, for pretty much any
situation, eventually. When we were doing the calcuations by hand, the approximations
were fairly rough unless you cared a LOT - like building a military aircraft. In those cases,
you hired literally hundreds of "calculators" - PEOPLE to work on their pieces of the
approximate solution, getting pretty darned close to what you needed, eventually, at great
cost.

Nowdays with HUGE digital computers, we can do many billions of calculations per day and
we can now do some really good approximate solutions. Today it turns out that I can build
a computer model and run a lot of tests on it before you actually build anything, and we can
"make our mistakes" in the computer simulation world before we actually build hardware. It
cuts costs and increases the effectiveness, safety, quality, etc of products all the time. There
have been some really, really good software tools developed during my career and we can
simulate some stuff now that I could hardly imagine 40 yrs ago.

The purely mathematical equations are still out there, mostly unsolved, but engineers - busy
actually making things - have pretty much moved past the exact solution route as an impractical
side road that we don't drive down any more and we all do it with really great approximations.

Read up on "finite element analysis". This is why the exact solutions are not a particularly big
deal any more. Nice, interesting, but not really necessary.

Bill

[waksupi]

I wonder if the kid ever saw a Buffington sight? He would have a ball checking calibrations.

[MtGun44]

Yes! I love the way they correct for the drift in that sight. Practical application, not
theory. The Army shot those things out to 2500 yds or something like that and knew
exactly what happened from "actual field testing", not theory or equations.

Bill

[nanuk]

I think he input the wrong integer in the equation thereby rendering the Philberg Flange incompatible on the horizontal plane, with the Grapplegrummit

[HangFireW8]

Here's a good analysis of the newsworthiness of this item-

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/05/28/11920006-16-year-olds-equations-set-off-buzz-over-325-year-old-physics-puzzler?lite

HF

[popper]

1) No, he didn't get it right until he gets the CORRECT value of PI. A project for next year.
2) German snipers will now be better than ours.
3) He's Indian, not German
3) Norden and artillery computers were MECHANICAL.
4) Who checked his work?