Laces high
December 4th, 2002 by Larry Burton
Sometimes you read things and wonder why would someone think of writing about this. I’m not saying it isn’t interesting. I’m not saying it’s useless. I just wonder what makes people think up this stuff.
“Hundreds of years of trial and error have led to the strongest way of lacing our shoes,” says mathematician Burkard Polster: the ’straight-lace’ and ‘criss-cross’ methods. But there are about 400 million different “reasonable” ways of weaving one lace through a shoe with seven eyelets down each side, says Polster, who works at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.
I don’t doubt that someone will find this information extremely valuable one day but why did anyone think about studying this?
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