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!
Further reading
Cheesed off! Families roundly cheated by trendy oval pizzas as experts warn they are smaller in size… And how CAN you slice them into equal portions, anyway? in The Daily Mail
Why those trendy new oval pizzas you see in major supermarkets may not be worth it, in The Mirror
(Sadly, all proper newspapers have declined to comment)