Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Sinusoidal Curves in Ski Racing

As I thought about this blog, and what I should write about, I just couldn't find much inspiration.  I began to think of ways that I could relate sine, cosine, or tangent to my life.  Since ski season is just getting started, I naturally thought of ski racing.  I believe that a sinusoidal curve can be used to model the turns that a ski racer makes around the gates on any given course.
Here's a picture to refer back to, in order to make what I say more clear:
As you can see, there are various different aspects of sine curves that are evident in a series of ski turns:  
Observation 1: The horizontal distance from red gate to a point collinear with the blue gate is the amplitude of the sine curve.
Observation 2: The vertical distance from the red gate a point collinear with the blue gate, is the wave length of the sine curve.
Observation 3: The distance from blue gate to blue gate, is the period of the sine curve.

I think that it is neat that I could apply this to my skiing.  While I was skiing this past weekend, I was thinking about these sine curves and what I was creating with my skis. Math really is everywhere!

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