James Stewart, author of calculus texts, has a $24 million house. It has lots of curved walls. Problem: find their areas or volumes, by integrating.
Simmons Hall, an MIT dorm opened in 2002, has a lot of oddly shaped rooms. (I found this silly, because the curved walls meant wasted space -- but I didn't live there, I just had friends who did, so it didn't bother me too much.) The story goes that the Cambridge fire department had trouble giving them a certificate of occupancy because they couldn't determine the volume of certain rooms and therefore couldn't determine whether they were adequately ventilated.
(Article from the Wall Street Journal; link from Casting Out Nines.)
A random walk through mathematics -- mostly through the random part.
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5 comments:
Stata has a bunch of non-vertical walls, which also would lead to "wasted" space. But I don't necessarily think that architecture is an issue of maximizing space. (The slanted walls did bother my officemate though).
I have to say, we used Stewart's textbooks for single variable and multivariable calculus at my university and I thought I felt ripped off when I bought the books.
Knowing that not only did I get gouged at school, but that Stewart amassed $24M really pisses me off :P
I tried not to write but could not help myself:
He had time to write the textbooks and make all those movies?
Instead of measuring the house's size by integrating, one could use Edison's method - fill it with water and then measure the water.
I was going to suggest the same thing as Ori. And also point out that this would be particularly easy for the fire department.
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