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Do we have an inborn ability to locate the center of an object?
Imagine a drawing of a circle or a rectangle. It seems to me that it would be easy to locate the center with a great deal of accuracy, relying only on our intuition. The same holds for three dimensional objects – imagine a hologram of a sphere or cube.
What about irregularly shaped objects? Imagine an arbitrary triangle. I think we could still come pretty close to finding the center. But which center? You may remember from high school geometry that a triangle has more than one center. I am guessing that the center we would naturally locate would be the center of gravity, the intersection of the medians.
What about irregularly shaped quadrilaterals? Concave ones may present a problem, but convex ones should be fairly easy. If the scientific community has neglected this area of research, I would accept an NSF grant to fill in this gap in our knowledge.
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