{"id":27093,"date":"2007-04-26T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2007-04-26T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/04\/26\/the-intermediate-value-theory-helps-your-table-but-not-necessarily-your-beer\/"},"modified":"2007-04-26T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2007-04-26T10:00:01","slug":"the-intermediate-value-theory-helps-your-table-but-not-necessarily-your-beer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20070426-01\/?p=27093","title":{"rendered":"The intermediate value theory helps your table but not necessarily your beer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>An Australian mathematician <a href=\"http:\/\/www.abc.net.au\/news\/newsitems\/200512\/s1524163.htm\"> applied intermediate value theory to the problem of keeping a table from wobbling<\/a>: Just rotate the table and you&#8217;ll eventually find a spot.\n A few things struck me about that article. First, that it explains that intermediate value theory &#8220;is the same principle underlying the fact that there will always be two points with exactly the same temperature somewhere on Earth.&#8221; While that&#8217;s true, it&#8217;s way overkill. Intermediate value theory lets you find two points on any <i>circle<\/i> with the same temperature; you don&#8217;t need a whole sphere. (Perhaps they got the scenario mixed up with the Borsuk-Ulam theorem, which shows the significantly stronger result that you can find two <i>antipodal<\/i> points on the Earth with the same temperature <i>and pressure<\/i>.)\n The next thing that struck me is that the author <i>twice<\/i> used beer to illustrate the article. But then again, it was an Australian article, so maybe that&#8217;s just normal for Australia.<\/p>\n<p> Finally, the article concludes that the theorem may help you place your refrigerator. Well, sure, <i>if you don&#8217;t care which direction the door faces<\/i>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>An Australian mathematician applied intermediate value theory to the problem of keeping a table from wobbling: Just rotate the table and you&#8217;ll eventually find a spot. A few things struck me about that article. First, that it explains that intermediate value theory &#8220;is the same principle underlying the fact that there will always be two [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-27093","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>An Australian mathematician applied intermediate value theory to the problem of keeping a table from wobbling: Just rotate the table and you&#8217;ll eventually find a spot. A few things struck me about that article. First, that it explains that intermediate value theory &#8220;is the same principle underlying the fact that there will always be two [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27093","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27093"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27093\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27093"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27093"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27093"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}