Cutting a round cake with knife, elastic bands and principles
(Phys.org) —There is a good way and a bad way to cut cake. Ask Alex Bellos the author of The Grapes of Math: How Life Reflects Numbers and Numbers Reflect Life. Bellos talks about scientific principles governing a better way to cut a cake then taking a knife to just slice into a cake's circle shape for serving triangular wedges. The classic cut-into-wedges way is the bad way. In a Numberphile instructional video, first taking a knife, and going up to the center and creating a slice, appears to be just fine but he reveals why it is not fine: After cutting out the wedge as a slice, if you place the rest of the cake in the fridge to keep overnight, on the next day you find that the part of the cake closest to the opening where you had sliced is dry. So that leftover slice...