{"id":20465,"date":"2023-07-17T18:30:54","date_gmt":"2023-07-17T18:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=20465"},"modified":"2026-01-18T19:09:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-18T19:09:12","slug":"professor-emeritus-stan-wagons-square-wheeled-bike-inspires-london-bridge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2023\/07\/professor-emeritus-stan-wagons-square-wheeled-bike-inspires-london-bridge\/","title":{"rendered":"Professor Emeritus Stan Wagon\u2019s Square-Wheeled Bike Inspires London Bridge"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Photo by Ethan Brown<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In mid-March, Stan Wagon, professor emeritus of experimental mathematics, woke up to an email from someone he didn\u2019t know. In the message, an engineer from the United Kingdom described a new bridge he and his team recently built and then he thanked Dr. Wagon for the inspiration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The Cody Dock Rolling Bridge in London took seven years to complete and had just won The Bridges Design Award in the UK, with judges calling it \u201ca unique and novel design capturing the spirit of engineering,\u201d and an \u201cinnovative derivation of the rolling path of the bridge using historical square-wheel mathematics.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cI almost fell out of my chair,\u201d said Wagon, who now lives in Colorado.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nearly twenty-five years after Wagon\u2019s invention of a working square-wheeled bicycle made international headlines, earned a place in the National Museum of Mathematics, and was even cited by <em>Ripley\u2019s Believe It or Not!<\/em>, a team in London had built a rotating bridge that was a first-of-its-kind in the world, all based on his original bicycle design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cContrary to popular belief, advanced math ideas can be really exciting, surprising, and just plain fun,\u201d says mathematics professor William Mitchell. Wagon\u2019s original bicycle had been in storage at Macalester since 2017, and Mitchell led the effort to resurrect it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cWe realized that Stan\u2019s bike is portable enough to bring outside once or twice a year to celebrate the creativity and unexpected whimsy of mathematics,\u201d says mathematics professor Andrew Beveridge. To celebrate both the bike\u2019s recent inspiration and the seniors in the Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science Department, students, faculty, and staff were invited to ride the bike at an April event.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To celebrate, students, faculty, and staff were invited to ride the bike at an April event.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1077,"featured_media":20561,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academics","category-alumni","mediatype-articles"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":[8],"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1077"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20465"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30089,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20465\/revisions\/30089"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}