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clock-iconPUBLISHEDOctober 11, 2015

The Scientific Way to Cut a Cake

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Laura Suen

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Cake by Lisarlena via Wikimedia Commons. CC-BY-SA-3.0.

When you cut a cake to produce a slice like the one in the picture above, you're actually performing a non-optimal cut. Why? If you don't eat the rest immediately, the inner surfaces of the remaining cake are exposed to the air, drying it out.

In a 1906 edition of the journal Nature, a mathematician explained the optimal, scientific way to cut a cake to ensure it doesn't dry out. As Numberphile explains in the video below, the mathematician proposed a series of straight cuts across the entire cake. With this method, the remaining uneaten pieces can be pushed together so that no surfaces are exposed to the air for a prolonged period of time.

To understand how to cut your cakes the scientific way, view the video below.

 

 


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