M*A*T*H Colloquium: Skateboard Tricks and Topological Flips

Skateboard Tricks and Topological Flips with Gabriel de Oliveira Martins, Sacramento State

We analyze the continuous deformations between different skateboard tricks, and we show that up to deformation there are only four flip tricks. This is accomplished by describing the motion of skateboard flip tricks as continuous curves in the matrix group SO(3). We will also present animations and visualizations developed in Python for this project. Our strategy can be seen as an application of Dirac's belt trick to a system with additional symmetries.

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