The wine is poured, the food is warm, the company is great and then . . . the table wobbles. What to do? Search for a beer coaster or a serviette or a wad of coasters? No. It’s a waste of time. An international team of mathematicians has calculated all you have to do to beat the wobbles is rotate the table. Eventually you will find a position that keeps the table stable, even on rough surfaces, including the back yard. The only requirement is that the legs of your table form a perfect rectangle. “It almost always works,” Burkard Polster, a member of the team and a senior Monash University mathematics lecturer, told The Sydney Morning Herald. Working with mathematicians from Germany and New Zealand, the team researched the solution for the best part of a year. There’s often a trade-off. Polster advises they have solved the wobble problem, but the table won’t necessarily be horizontal.
