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Hollis Williams
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Brachistochrone for a Rolling Sphere with Slippage

I was recently looking into generalisations of the brachistochrone problem: for example, in this article the authors study the brachistochrone with Amontons-Coulomb friction where a bead slides along a wire from one fixed point to another under the influence of gravity and friction.

In this one the author considers the brachistochrone for a sphere which rolls without friction. It seems like in the literature no-one has studied the brachistochrone/tautochrone curves for a homogeneous sphere with slippage between sphere and surface ie. a sphere which slides and rolls with friction (I am happy to be corrected if I am wrong on this). Is there any reason why this solution would be impossible to obtain or something to do with the effect of slip being too difficult to analyze?

I note that in the first article it is possible to express the solution in terms of elementary functions but perhaps that is no longer possible for the rolling sphere problem.

Hollis Williams
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