Pizza is one of the few foods that is easy to share in theory but never in practice. Somebody always ends up with the smaller slice, causing a lot of relationship strife.
Thankfully, as detailed in New Scientist, a few mathematicians have been on the case for the past two decades and have finally devised a system for determining the portioning out of pizza when two people sit down to eat an entire pie.
Mathematicians Rick Mabry and Paul Deiermann, a professor at Southeast Missouri State in Cape Girardeau, began dissecting the issue in 1994, after a casual discussion of how to ensure that a pizza was equally divided.
The formula for cutting up a pie is incredibly complicated because of the number of variables involved. A pizza is relatively easy to separate into equal portions if the initial cut is through the center -- but what are the odds that a pizza chef or waiter will make that first pass in the exact center of the pie?
The likely outcome is an off-centered series of slices and the theory that if two people are splitting a pie, the one who gets the slice that runs through the center will either get more or less pizza depending on the total number of slices.
At 3, 7, 11 and 15 slices, the person who gets the center eats more in total. But with 5, 9, 13, and 17 slices, the person who gets the center eats less.
It took a head-numbing combination of geography and algebra to prove that concept, but it is one you can take with you the next time you share a pizza with a friend. Count the total number of slices and either grab or avoid the center piece accordingly.
It's essentially the Pizza Hut equivalent of code breaking.
[Image via Flickr: modern carpentry]
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How is this even a problem? My wife and I always end up with a couple extra slices, and she doesn't eat left-overs, so I always end up with more pizza.
The article is puzzling, I suspect to everyone outside mathematicians. The center piece is the slice that contains what would be the exact center point of the round pizza pie.
Furthermore how many pizzas are really round? I haven't seen many protractors or calipers around a pizza oven.
Me and the boys probably solved this equation eons ago but were too wasted to publish our research...
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