On Christmas Day, a tiger leapt from its enclosure before killing a 17-year-old visitor to the San Francisco Zoo. In a new paper posted on the arXiv, a couple of enterprising Boston-based investigators tackle the basic physics problem implied by the incident:
Can a tiger overcome an obstacle that is thirty-three feet away and twelve and a half feet tall?
It’s a classic two-dimensional projectile motion problem – could a tiger, running at its maximum speed and launching itself at the right angle, clear the fence surrounding the enclosure? (You’d think the problem might have been worked out a little sooner...) In the paper, the authors helpfully connect their equations to the real world, like in this quip:
We begin by first writing down the two-dimensional kinematical equations satisfied by the projectile (tiger).
So can the cat clear the fence?
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