Okay, picture this scenario. You’re at a party and the doorbell rings. It’s the pizza delivery dude! You open the box, but alas, as always, all the slices are differently sized. Someone is definitely going to get stuck with a tiny piece, and they’ll fall asleep that night dreaming of a more just world where all slices are equal.
When I was 16, my first job was working at [insert well-known national pizza chain name here]. I was the phone girl primarily, but sometimes when the guys that worked there got lazy, I would get to make pizza. As the (self-proclaimed) Paste Pizza Princess, this was a dream come true. After the pizza was baked at record speed in the seemingly-magical oven, we would use a monstrous see-saw blade with handles that could slice the pizza in four swift rotations. Unless you were somehow a master at symmetry, though, the slices were NEVER perfect. It’s great if you get the biggest piece, but as it is in most factors of life, someone will get the shortest stick (or smallest slice).
Lucky, MATH has come to the rescue. Two University of Liverpool mathematicians, Joel Haddley and Stephen Worsley, wanted to see if there was a way that they could slice a pizza as perfectly as it gets. And you know what? They figured it out using something called mohedral disc tiling. Unfortunately, as Mashable pointed out, for some of these designs, there are going to be some sad pizza eaters. Some of the designs give you pizza “slices” that are almost all crust.
Courtesy of University of Liverpool
Courtesy of University of Liverpool
For more of the mohedral disc tilings, click here.
Maybe the best way to go about all of this is to just eat an entire pizza by yourself.