In my brief moment of semi-fame, my exploration of parallel parking ended up in the New York Times 10th Annual Year In Ideas magazine [url]http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/19/magazine/ideas2010.html#Perfect_Parallel_Parking[/url].
Shortly after there was a front page article in the local New Orleans Times-Picayune [url]http://www.nola.com/education/index.ssf/2011/01/offbeat_lusher_charter_school.html[/url]
I certainly have to credit Professor Simon Blackburn, University of London, for his original work which sparked my interest in the subject.
[url]https://www.ma.rhul.ac.uk/SRBparking[/url]
Even though Geogebra was never mentioned by name in any of the news articles, it was central to my being able to visualize the problem better and test/confirm my equations.
This Geogebra model is in US customary units. I've also posted a metric model at [url]http://www.geogebratube.org/material/show/id/3023[/url]
My biggest thrill in this exploration was finding that a formula I was about to teach in my PreCalculus class -- the sine sum/difference formula -- was the key to solving this problem analytically.
If interested, you may find the gory analytic details at [url]http://www.talljerome.com/NOLA/parallelparking/index.html[/url]
