{"id":3,"date":"2004-11-13T10:34:04","date_gmt":"2004-11-13T02:34:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=3"},"modified":"2012-07-27T20:48:44","modified_gmt":"2012-07-27T12:48:44","slug":"suspension-bridges","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/mathematics\/suspension-bridges-3","title":{"rendered":"Suspension Bridges"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There have been some embarrassments involving suspension bridges - the Tacoma Narrows bridge in the US spectacularly fell down in the 1940s because when the wind hit it at a certain velocity, it began to oscillate at its natural frequency. It kept vibrating until it shook itself to pieces. The solution was to build bridges which were aerodynamic - so they actually 'flew' when the wind hit. See more at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lib.washington.edu\/specialcollections\/collections\/exhibits-portals\">Univ of Washington Library<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>More recently, the Millenium Bridge in London suffered from \"synchronous lateral excitation\" when people started to walk across it. What happened was as they walked, the people felt a sideways motion and then they all started to walk in step - something the designers never expected. The solution was to install dampeners which would dissipate the sideways energy.<\/p>\n<p>So is this more about physics than mathematics? No - the whole problem with maths education has been that it is seen as a bunch of algebraic manipulations, rather than a tool to solve real-world problems, like suspension bridges...<\/p>\n<p class=\"alt\"><a href=\"#respond\" id=\"comms\">Be the first to comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There have been some embarrassments involving suspension bridges - the Tacoma Narrows bridge in the US spectacularly fell down in the 1940s because when the wind hit it at a certain velocity, it began to oscillate at its natural frequency. It kept vibrating until it shook itself to pieces. The solution was to build bridges [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}