The rolling of a disk on a horizontal plane and Euler’s disk

The rolling of a disk (or hoop, etc.) on a horizontal plane – without dissipation – is a classical problem. Many second-year undergraduate students of the author’s generation, studied the stability of the motion in which the disk rolls steadily in a straight line. The problem is treated in the text book [1], the author used as an undergraduate 40 years ago. Current mathematical software, e.g. Matlab, makes work on the problem accessible to present-day second-year engineering mathematics students. This paper is partly a composite of assignment and exam questions used in 2006. There are research topics surrounding the problem. A catalyst for some recent work on the problem is the toy marketed under the name ‘Euler’s disk’.