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Editor’s Note (7/29/16): An earlier version of this story contained several biographical inaccuracies and did not give Jim Papadopoulos a chance to respond to the comment about his ability to finish things. Michael Papadopoulos moved his family to the United States more than a decade before taking a job at Oregon, not in 1967. Jim Papadopoulos spent a whole academic year at Oregon before starting at MIT. He did not write to bike companies asking for work until the 1990s. His time at the US Geological Survey was part of an internship, not a full-time job. The e-mail list he moderated was also founded by him, and is called Hardcore Bicycle Science. He has actually published three first-author papers, but just one related to bicycle science. He was also not given a chance to respond to a comment about his ability to finish things.
Seven bikes lean against the wall of Jim Papadopoulos's basement in Boston, Massachusetts. Their paint is scratched, their tyres flat. The handmade frame that he got as a wedding present is coated in fine dust. “I got rid of most of my research bikes when I moved,” he says. The bicycles that he kept are those that mean something to him. “These are the ones I rode.”
Papadopoulos, who is 62, has spent much of his life fascinated by bikes, often to the exclusion of everything else. He competed in amateur races while a teenager and at university, but his obsession ran deeper. He could never ride a bike without pondering the mathematical mysteries that it contained. Chief among them: What unseen forces allow a rider to balance while pedalling? Why must one initially steer right in order to lean and turn left? And how does a bike stabilize itself when propelled without a rider?
