Colin Wright
speaker
49 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2012
last heard Dec 2012
Colin Wright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But then we realised that if you do stick to a perfectly metronomic beat and you don't move your hands around, then the only thing that matters about the juggling balls is when they come down, the amount of time that they've been in the air.
And so we could abstract away from the diagram and turn it into a string of numbers.
That is a juggling trick.
Now, not every string of numbers is a valid juggling trick.
And so that became an interesting piece of mathematics then.
If given a random string of numbers or a string of numbers from some other source, without actually juggling it, is there a way of telling whether or not it corresponds to a juggling trick?
And the one that you've just given me does.
It corresponds to doing the normal three-ball cascade, which is like an infinity sign, a figure of eight lying on its side.
Then the four is a vertical throw from one hand and the two is hang on to the ball for a beat.
and then pick up where you left off.
So 3-3-3, 4-2, 3-3-3.
Well, if you're juggling four balls and you're juggling a ball on every beat and all of the throws are the same, then the balls will take it in turn.
So that means you do red, green, blue, orange, red, green, blue, orange, red, green, blue, orange.
And the red ball is thrown every fourth time.
The amazing thing was that when we were developing this, we had several ideas that didn't work.
And so when we finally got this one with the string of numbers, we thought, this looks quite promising.
We started to write down all of the tricks that we knew to stress the system, to see if it would work.
And we noticed patterns between the different tricks.
And when we arranged it in just the right way on the paper, we spotted that there was an overarching pattern to the juggling tricks, one which the physical juggling didn't expose, but the notation did.
And then we thought, hang on a minute, there are gaps here.
Showing 21–40 of 49 · page 2 of 3
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