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LostInParadise's avatar

Care to know how mathematicians divide a pizza?

Like me, you may naively think that the ordinary way of dividing a pizza is good enough. You are clearly not sufficiently overthinking about this. Suppose, for example, that you want to divide a large pizza into 12 slices and half the people like the crust and half do not. Everyone can be taken care of by slicing the pizza like this

I took this picture from Matt Parker’s book Things to Do and Make in the Fourth Dimension, which I borrowed from the library. You may or may not find it relevant that, in addition to being a mathematician, Parker is a standup comic.

In doing Web searches about dividing pizza, I came across a result known as, I kid you not, the Pizza Theorem. It addresses another issue. Suppose that two people want to divide the pizza. In order to divide it in the usual way, you need to locate the center of the pizza. To do this accurately, requires use of compass and straightedge, which can get rather messy on the surface of the pizza. It turns out that you can center your cuts using any point in the pizza, as explained in this video

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