Sunday, October 21, 2012

Paper: "A random tour through some scaling laws"

This is a cool paper on scaling laws and dimensional analysis,
How fast does a yacht’s price scale with length? There’s no underlying physical law here, just the kind of question to which a mathematician at a boat show, astonished by the high prices, wants an answer.
Both the high resulting power (price p ∼ l3.5) and the quality of the fit (nearly 90% of variance) are striking. But notice that, for a given length and age, there’s still typically an e-fold variation in prices—due not only to condition, design and desirability, but probably also to the enormous cost of the kit (rig, engine, electronics etc.) on board.
Read about dimensional analysis.
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2 comments:

  1. Stagflationary MarkOctober 22, 2012 at 7:21 PM

    To an applied mathematician, the Body Mass Index (BMI), your mass m divided by the square of your height h, is a peculiar construct.

    That section was particularly interesting to me.

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  2. CPOctober 22, 2012 at 9:17 PM

    Have you read about constructal theory?

    ReplyDelete