The Aperiodical 

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Cutting an oval pizza – video

By Katie Steckles. Posted March 14, 2017

As if there wasn’t enough maths/pizza news lately, the story has hit the red-tops recently that UK supermarkets are scamming consumers by offering them oval-shaped pizzas – marketed in the high-end/’Extra Special’ ranges, with more expensive (sounding) ingredients like mozzarella di bufala, roquito peppers and merguez sausage, and a distinctive pair of artisanally different radii. These pizzas apparently cost more per gram, because their elliptical shape means they’re actually smaller than a circle with the same diameter. Cue plenty of ‘costing you dough’ and ‘cheesed off’ puns.

While we’re not massively bothered by the pricing, the articles do raise, and then completely fail to address, an interesting point: an oval pizza is harder to cut into equally sized pieces! Luckily, maths is here to save the day. I found a nice method and made a video explaining how it works:

Take a look and improve your future pizza cutting technique!

Not a pizza pie chart

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted March 6, 2017

This tweet by YouGov appeared on my feed:

Forget pepperoni – mushroom is Britain's most liked pizza topping (65%), followed by onion (62%) and then ham (61%) https://t.co/5kYikXOEtF pic.twitter.com/AJezMfJHbk

— YouGov (@YouGov) March 6, 2017

Actually, for the purposes of criticism and comment, here’s a local copy of the image:



It should immediately set your data presentation colly wobbling.

Improbable John Conway/Pizza Hut collaboration for π day

By Paul Taylor. Posted March 11, 2016



John Conway, here pictured browsing the character table of $Fi_{23}$

Restaurant chain Pizza Hut in the US have announced a promotion for “Pi Day” on March 14, involving an unlikely partnership with renowned group-theorist, Life-wrangler and apparent pizza-lover John Conway. (Apparently, pizza and pie are somehow linked in America. It is probably best not to worry about this.)

Featuring on their blog as the inaugural post under the optimistic tags ‘math‘ and ‘John Conway‘, they explain that three maths puzzles set by Conway will be posted on Pi Day, “varying in level of difficulty from high school to Ph.D. level”. Residents of the 48 contiguous US states can leave their answers in the comments when the puzzles are posted, and the winners receive a 3.14-year supply of pizza (or, as the rules clarify, a somewhat more prosaic $1600 Pizza Hut gift card).

Obviously we will have to wait for the questions to be unveiled to be able to judge the appropriate level of excitement for this promotion, but with Conway involved, no maths-is-really-hard nonsense in the blog post, and not a formula for the perfect anything in sight, things are looking promising for a nice bit of harmless maths/poor childhood diet fun.

More information

Pizza Hut partners with mathematician John H. Conway for National Pi Day math contest – the blog post announcing the competition

John Conway on Wikipedia

Eight Easy Pieces (you can touch but don’t look)

By Card Colm. Posted March 26, 2015

Here’s a bar bet you can’t lose. Actually, it’s more of a kitchen bet, being a quiche cutting conundrum.

You’ve just bought a lovely fresh haggis quiche at your local Minus 4 shop and are planning to eat it in one sitting, in your kitchen with a friend. You’ve agreed to share it in the fairest possible way: one of you cuts and the other choses. The quiche is in the usual circular shape.



A coin is tossed—rather unnecessarily, it must be said—and it is determined that your friend gets to cut. You step out of the kitchen for a moment and upon your return discover to your horror that your friend has already done the cutting, but not as you had expected. Instead of making one simple straight cut as close to a diameter as possible, the big oaf has made four straight cuts.

Eugenia Cheng is at it again

By Christian Lawson-Perfect. Posted October 19, 2013

Dr Eugenia Cheng, category theorist, has accepted some money from Pizza Express in return for writing some nonsense about pizzas.

This doesn’t really merit a post here, apart from to point out that Dr Cheng very scrupulously denied taking any kind of payment the last time she got a “formula for the perfect X” story in the papers, linked to a clotted cream company.

Read: On the perfect size for a pizza, by Eugenia Cheng

via MetaFilter.