Hasta La Gadget!

Oct 23

Mathematician works out formula for perfect pizza

When the moon hits your eye like a perfectly proportioned pizza pie.

(Credit: text: Amanda Kooser/CNET, image: Nova)

You may think you know how to make a mean pizza pie. You stretch out the dough and eyeball the toppings, but you’re still operating in the realm of guesswork. To turn out a truly fine pizza, you need cold, hard math to back you up. You need Eugenia Cheng, a mathematician with the University of Sheffield in the UK.

Cheng turned her considerable skills toward the noble pursuit of figuring out a formula for creating the perfect pizza. She shares her results in a paper titled “On the perfect size for a pizza (PDF).” Go check it out for all the juicy mathematical details.

The paper’s abstract is short and sweet: “We investigate the mathematical relationship between the size of a pizza and its ratio of topping to base in a median bite. We show that for a given recipe, it is not only the overall thickness of the pizza that is is affected by its size, but also this topping-to-base ratio.”

Cheng’s work assumes that the same amount of dough and toppings go into each size of pie. Her formula uses “t” to designate the constant volume of toppings, “d” to designate the constant volume of dough, and “r” for radius. The formul… [Read more]