Christopher Columbus's roly-poly egg
Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.
Everyone has heard that Christopher Columbus was challenged to stand an egg on end. Regardless of the solution the navigator supposedly came up with, the story is false anyway. What's important is the underlying mathematical problem, known as the stability problem.
We say that an object on a flat horizontal surface, such as a table, is stable if it remains still. A sphere is stable in any position, while an egg is only stable when lying down.
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In 1995, the great Russian mathematician Vladimir Arnold asked if there is any shape that has a single, stable position.
An egg that would be stable in that special position and no other (like a roly-poly toy, but without the trickery: roly-poly toy eggs contain a ballast without which they wouldn't work).
Arnold was at the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Hamburg, and one evening there was a dinner in his honor. The young Hungarian Gábor Domokos, despite the meal being expensive and having little money, insisted on attending. This changed his life.
The next day, he met Arnold, just as the Russian was trying to get rid of a nuisance. Recognizing Domokos from dinner, he claimed as an excuse that he had arranged to meet him. In their conversation, Arnold advised his colleague on his research and mentioned the problem of stability. For Domokos, it became an obsession that would consume him for more than ten years.
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