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arXiv · 1507.00871

Average pace and horizontal chords

Keith Burns·Orit Davidovich·Diana Davis
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Abstract

We are motivated by a problem about running: If a race was completed in an average pace of P minutes per mile, is there necessarily some mile of the race that was run in exactly P minutes? The answer is no. We explain why, and describe the history of this celebrated problem, known as the Universal Chord Theorem. We also clarify and streamline the proof of a more powerful result by Heinz Hopf from 1937.

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Keith Burns, Orit Davidovich, Diana Davis. 2015-07-03. Average pace and horizontal chords. https://arxiv.org/abs/1507.00871

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