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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Slavík, Antonín, Wagon, Stan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03749
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author Slavík, Antonín
Wagon, Stan
author_facet Slavík, Antonín
Wagon, Stan
contents In 1960, G. B. Robison discovered the general equations relating roads and wheels, where either can have an unusual shape (e.g., the square wheel rolls smoothly on a catenary). But he used some inobvious assumptions regarding the meaning of rolling. Here we derive the equations for the road appropriate for a given wheel using only the single assumption that rolling occurs with no slipping. We do not require that the wheel be differentiable, so this allows the construction of a wheel-road pair when the wheel is a continuous nowhere differentiable function.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_03749
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Minimalist Approach to Rolling Wheels
Slavík, Antonín
Wagon, Stan
Classical Analysis and ODEs
53A04
In 1960, G. B. Robison discovered the general equations relating roads and wheels, where either can have an unusual shape (e.g., the square wheel rolls smoothly on a catenary). But he used some inobvious assumptions regarding the meaning of rolling. Here we derive the equations for the road appropriate for a given wheel using only the single assumption that rolling occurs with no slipping. We do not require that the wheel be differentiable, so this allows the construction of a wheel-road pair when the wheel is a continuous nowhere differentiable function.
title A Minimalist Approach to Rolling Wheels
topic Classical Analysis and ODEs
53A04
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.03749