Egg

In other equation news: meet the egg. Ernie the Genie caught it at last!

Valeriy G. Narushin and Michael N. Romanov were "visiting"; Darren K. Griffin works at the University of Kent - as a geneticist. Hence, I think, why Griffin directed the research but took third billing as mathematician. The trio published at - where else - Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. So much for the Royal Society.

I had thought we'd had this equation already - what's that "ovoid", then? - but no, the actual ovum is something else.

Just looking at it, I'd say what you need to do is photograph it from the side, draw the x axis through Bigendia and Littleendia, and figure out the y = f(x) function. Rotating f(x) around the x axis is the last step which any moron can look up on DuckDuckGo. But again, they didn't do that; they just added another function to the ovoid equation. (Not to the pyriform.)

They say that different birds have slightly different f(x) so, I take it, they needed to get, er, cracking on whatever constants were feeding that function.

The Cantiacs note, obviously, that taking away processing-time means smarter storage and handling of eggs. But it also opens up, say, 3D-printing for whatever else you might need to schlep around in an egg form. Eggs are large enough to incubate a [payload], small enough to exit [a small aperture] in the most efficient way, not roll away once laid, structurally sound enough to bear weight. They think thin walled vessels as eggs should be stronger than spheres of the same shape. I am unsure about that in no-gravity, but I do wonder about an egg at the front of a rocket heading on up.

Which means this shape needs to be taught to geometry students, starting (I'd say) at A-Level / AP.