![]() Tuning Metaheuristics: A Machine Learning Perspective. "Some Considerations on the Experimental Methodology". Service science, management and engineering: education for the 21st century. "Art of Service: Drawing the Arts to inform Service Design and Specification". ^ Mager, Birgit Evenson, Shelley (1 February 2008)."The Coase Theorem is widely cited in economics. "How spherical-cow philosophy makes hard physics problems easy". Archived from the original on 9 October 1999. ![]() In the space gravity simulator educational video game Universe Sandbox, a spherical cow was added as a user-placeable object in March 2023. Leonard Hofstadter with the punchline mentioning "spherical chickens in a vacuum", in " The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization" episode. In the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, a joke is told by Dr. "Spherical Cow" was chosen as the codename for the Fedora 18 Linux distribution. References to the joke appear even outside the field of scientific modeling. A 2015 paper on the systemic errors introduced by simplifying assumptions about spherical symmetries in galactic dark-matter haloes was titled "Milking the spherical cow – on aspherical dynamics in spherical coordinates". For example, Consider a Spherical Cow is a 1988 book about problem solving using simplified models. The concept is familiar enough that the phrase is sometimes used as shorthand for the entire issue of proper modeling. Cultural references Ī drawing of a spherical cow on skis, with the text Approksimoidaan pyöreä lehmä ( Finnish for "We approximate a spherical cow"). A 1973 letter to the editor in the journal Science describes the "famous story" about a physicist whose solution to a poultry farm's egg-production problems began with "Postulate a spherical chicken". It is told in many variants, including a joke about a physicist who said he could predict the winner of any race provided it involved spherical horses moving through a vacuum. Shortly thereafter the physicist returned to the farm, saying to the farmer, "I have the solution, but it works only in the case of spherical cows in a vacuum." ![]() The scholars then returned to the university, notebooks crammed with data, where the task of writing the report was left to the team leader. A multidisciplinary team of professors was assembled, headed by a theoretical physicist, and two weeks of intensive on-site investigation took place. Milk production at a dairy farm was low, so the farmer wrote to the local university, asking for help from academia. The phrase comes from a joke that spoofs the simplifying assumptions sometimes used in theoretical physics. The metaphor and variants have subsequently been used in other disciplines. ![]() Originating in theoretical physics, the metaphor refers to physicists' tendency to reduce a problem to the simplest form imaginable in order to make calculations more feasible, even if the simplification hinders the model's application to reality. The spherical cow is a humorous metaphor for highly simplified scientific models of complex phenomena. Comic of a spherical cow as illustrated by a 1996 meeting of the American Astronomical Association, in reference to astronomy modeling ![]()
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