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.

[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.

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.

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.

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.