The Perfect Way To Slice a Pizza

iamapizza writes "New Scientist reports on the quest of two math boffins for the perfect way to slice a pizza. It's an interesting and in-depth article; 'The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-center, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-center cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighboring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza — and if not, who will get more?' This is useful, of course, if you're familiar with the concept of 'sharing' a pizza."

Comments

Unsure.

[Hillview]

My biggest pizza cutting dilemma happened just the other day. I wasn't sure I could eat six pieces, so I cut it into four.

Re:Unsure.

[SomeoneGotMyNick]

A standard pizza is usually cut in 8 pieces. Who cuts it into 6?

It was a Metric pizza

Re:Unsure.

[von_rick]

Could be a group of 1.5 people as well.

Re:Unsure.

[crazypip666]

A metric pizza should have ten slices.

Re:Unsure.

[CecilPL]

This thread is going nowhere.

Re:Unsure.

[Vainglorious Coward]

A metric pizza would have a circumference of 1 meter

More likely metric would follow the pattern of paper sizing, so an A0 pizza would have an area of 1 square meter (for a diameter of ~ 113cm), an A1 pizza would be 0.5 square meters (diameter 80cm), A2 would have half that area and so on. A typical pizza would be A4 : an area of one sixteenth of a square meter, so a diameter of close to 30 cm.

Then there's the B series, which works in the same way, but starting from B0 having an area of 0.5 square meters, and with the inclusion of anchovys.

Maybe

[BeanThere]

a slightly foreign concept here, but usually the woman/women get(s) the smaller pieces and everyone's happy. Simple.

Re:Maybe

[Nadaka]

I am 6ft tall. My fiance is 4ft 9in and about half my weight. If I ate as little as she did, I would starve. If she ate as much as I did, she would pop. There is nothing misogynistic about it, women are on average smaller than men, they will eat less.

Re:Limewire

[AndrewNeo]

"You wouldn't copy a pizza, would you?"

Tricks from insiders

[Just Some Guy]

I worked at a couple of pizza places when I was in high school. There are actually two perfect ways to slice a pizza:

1. On a large pizza, make two parallel cuts maybe 3/4" apart on either side of the midline. Set the long, skinny slice aside. The pizza will still appear round, within normal limits of eccentricity. Continue slicing as normal, box it, and send it. Eat the long, skinny slice. Repeat until you are no longer hungry.
2. Starting slicing from the center of the pizza and working outward. Eyeball it (which you should be pretty good at, since you've sliced thousands of pizzas and you're well-fed for the evening) and carve the pie into 11 or 13 slices. Wonder later if people are still trying to figure out where the extra slice came from, or which greedy SOB ate one piece more than they should have.

Re:Tricks from insiders

[Dread_ed]

For some reason the assumption is that everyone wants the same size slice of pizza. I disagree. I prefer a pizza with a variety of slice sizes.

For instance, large slices are good for large appetites/people (men), while medium and small slices are good for smaller appetitets/people(women and children). Also, the small ones are a perfect finisher when you have just consumed a number of large slices and are just about to bust.

Also, the slice porportion and their accompanying aesthetics are important. Somedays the fat-looking big slices that are almost a fourth of the pizza look best. Other times the skinny ones that are so slim they can't even legitamately accommodate an intact piece of pepperoni appeal to me. Proportion can weigh as heavily as quantity and distribution of toppings when it comes to choosing the perfect slice.

Personally, I would be interested in a cutting pattern that guaranteed the most variety of slice sizes.

4 whole pieces?

[NoPantsJim]

I prefer to roll mine into a giant tube, thus consuming only one piece.

Also, when people ask what I had for breakfast, I can respond with "A wrap"

Re:4 whole pieces?

[Beardo the Bearded]

Thanks, that's the best laugh of the day. I've ordered $180 worth of pizza for dinner tonight (it's a dinner meeting for 35 people) and I was thinking about someone rolling these 18", 2" deep jumbos into a wrap.

Someone on /. has a sig that said:

A pizza with depth a and radius z has a volume of pi z z a.

11

[hoggoth]

I always maximize my pizza by cutting it into 11 pieces. That way I get much more pizza than most people. I get 11 slices.

Back in the day...

[LynnwoodRooster]

when I worked at Godfather's Pizza, I finally "graduated" to cut table. The guy to cut the pizzas and call out the orders. I used to enjoy having fun sometimes when a pair of semi-buzzed guys would come in and order a pizza. Cut the pizza into 9 pieces with the roller, rather than the rocker, and watch them get upset over who gets the last piece! Ah, fun times as a teenager...

Physicist Pizza

[LanMan04]

Are we talking perfectly round, frictionless pizzas?