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by Asraelite
904 days ago
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I've thought about this before and came to the non-rigorous conclusion that if you define the middle as always being equidistant between the nearest points on the shoreline, then its length must be finite. The same is true if you define it as the shortest path through the river. Basically this is because an infinite-length line must "loop back" on itself, so that at some point it curves by at least 90° from the main direction of movement. This can never happen at a small scale for the middle of a river. I would really love a mathematician to weigh in on this though. The one main problem I can see is that it might lead to something akin to the Weierstrass function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weierstrass_function which itself has infinite length, although I don't quite understand why this is or if it's applicable to the case of rivers. |
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