>> I certainly would have expected the blokes at Harvard to know that a football isn't a spheroid

> I've always heard the football shape defined as an "oblate spheroid." Is that any more accurate?

No, an oblate spheroid is sphere-shaped but with one plane (like the earth's equator) that is a little bit wider than the plane that goes through the poles. The earth's rotation causes its "middle" to bulge out a bit. Hell, I don't even have to rotate to do THAT!

Asphere is a geometric figure whose shape is such that any two points on its surface are equidistant from the center. A ball. It can be generated by rotating a circle on an axis that goes through the center of the circle.

A spheroid is generated by rotating an ellipse around one of its axes. And an ellipse is a conic section (a slice through a cone) which slice is not parallel to an element of the cone and is not parallel to the axis of the cone. The other way to draw an ellipse is to put two pins into a tabletop, then use a loop of string to draw a figure on the tabletop with the string held tight. The string has to be more than twice as long as the distance between the two pins. As the string gets longer and longer in relation to the pin distance the ellipse approaches a circle. The shorter the string the more eccentric the figure is (meaning its "width" and "height" have a much greater ration than approaching 1:1.

A bird's egg is usually "ellipsoidal", though not a perfect ellipse, but in no case does a spheroid have points like a football. Ever.

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TEd