# Friday math movie - Robert Full on engineering and evolution

By Murray Bourne, 30 Apr 2010

This is a great movie from TED (aren't all TED movies great?).

Robert Full studies the animal world to improve robots (and Pixar cartoon characters). His enthusiasm for his topic is infectious.

He points out the movement of animals can be modeled using pogo sticks, and this leads to the development of stable moving robots with no feedback mechanism.

He has a joke at the expense of mathematics at around the 6-minute mark, but I'll forgive him - he's just appealing to the audience's normal fear of anything more complicated than 1 + 1 = 2.

It's a fairly old video (first filmed in 2002), but still interesting.

On with the show:

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