A Difference in Autumn Falls

摘要

Following the free-fall flight of Felix Baumgartner who fell from rest at a very high altitude over Roswell in New Mexico on 14 October 2012, another similar great fall took place recently over the same domain. This time Alan Eustace undertook an even greater fall on 24 October 2014. In each case records were broken. Following the first great fall, Graham Hoare aroused interest in the Letters Column of Mathematics Today [1], wishing to see a mathematical model that might predict accurately the known characteristics of the fall under gravity alone, given initial information such as the altitudes at the start and at the end of free fall.