The physics of hair
Maria Sharapova’s ponytail. Photo by JZ
BBC News – A UK/US team that came up with an equation to predict the shape of a ponytail has earned itself an Ig Nobel.
Patrick Warren, Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball and Joe Keller picked up their prestigious award at a sellout gala ceremony at Harvard University.
Igs are intended as a bit of a spoof on the more sober Nobel science prizes.
Other 2012 winners included teams that studied how chimps could recognise each other from their behinds and why coffee will spill out of a moving mug.
But although some of this celebrated research might sound daft, much of it is intended to tackle real-world problems and gets published in peer-reviewed, scholarly journals.
Dr Warren, who is a researcher for Unilever in the UK, said he was thrilled to pick up his Ig.
“I’m amazed that a piece of work I’ve done has attracted so much attention,” he told BBC News.
“My field, statistical physics, is not something that many will have heard of, so I’m really pleased we’ve done something that’s caught the imagination.”
His and his co-workers’ research produced what has become known as the “Ponytail Shape Equation”.
It takes into account the stiffness of the hair fibres on the head, the effects of gravity and the presence of the random curliness or waviness that is ubiquitous in human hair to model how a ponytail is likely to behave.
Together with a new quantity the team calls the Rapunzel Number, the equation can be used to predict the shape that hair will take when it is drawn behind the head and tied together…
Read The shape of a ponytail and the statistical physics of hair fiber bundles.
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September 25th, 2012 at 15:55
The “Ponytail Shape Equation” sounds like an episode of The Big Bang Theory.
September 25th, 2012 at 17:05
Big Bangs Theory.