Interdisciplinary Studies (Part 1)

An eccentric investor hired a biologist, a mathematician, and a physicist to design and train the perfect racehorse. After studying the problem for a couple of weeks, they returned to the investor to present their results.

The biologist said, “I’ve come up with a plan to breed the perfect racehorse. It’ll just take a thousand or two generations of breeding.”

The mathematician said, “I haven’t been able to solve this problem yet, but I’ve made some preliminary findings. So far, I’ve been able to show that for each horse race there will exist a winner, and furthermore that winner will be unique.”

So the investor’s hopes were pinned on the physicist, who began, “I think I’ve solved this race horse problem, but I had to make a few simplifying assumptions. First, let’s assume that each horse is a perfect frictionless rolling sphere…”