Cow as a of a sphere, leading to a related that topologists can't tell the difference between a coffee cup and a donut. A spherical cow is a humorous for highly simplified of complex real life phenomena.

Consider a spherical cow. By Thomas Lumley. Part of the point of mathematical modelling is discarding unimportant features of a problem to make it tractable.

The implication is that will often reduce a problem to the simplest form they can imagine in order to make calculations more feasible, even though such simplification may hinder the model's application to reality. The phrase comes from a joke that spoofs the simplifying assumptions that are sometimes used in theoretical physics. Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia.

A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. Stewart Bushong Radiologic Science Technologists Pdf Viewer. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, 'I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum'. It is told in many variants, including a joke about a physicist who said he could predict the winner of any race, provided it involved spherical horses moving through a vacuum, and a 1973 version based on a chicken., in his 1952 paper ' asserted that: 'a system which has spherical symmetry, and whose state is changing because of chemical reactions and diffusion. Cannot result in an organism such as a horse, which is not spherically symmetrical.' Contents • • • • Popular culture [ ] In an episode of the sitcom, the joke is told by Dr.

Leonard Hofstadter with a slight variation, the mentioning 'spherical chickens in a vacuum'. Spherical chickens can be further traced back to a letter to the editor of the journal titled A Spherical Chicken from 1973. New Cardscan Serial Number Invalid - Free And Software more.