why oh why do I keep falling for wired linkbait. I didn't learn this from a mathmatician, the pizza just sluffed in my had the right way one time and it stayed.
How Gauss Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
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Re: How Gauss Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
#32Huh, why does the original Wired article say "19th century math genius" instead of "Gauss"? Is Gauss really that unknown to Wired's audience?
Rules of Clickbait Headlines: never use one specific word where four vague ones, with at least one indicator each of antiquity, exulted discipline, and grandiosity.
Re: How Gauss Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
The point is that stiffness is provided by reducing the degrees of freedom that would cause flopping to those that would require you to "stretch, shrink or tear" the piece of pizza. As a result, in cases where your stresses are negligible compared to the yield strength of your material this approximation accurately predicts the behavior without resorting to FEM or in depth analysis. While I agree that there are more…
This has nothing to do with yield strength, which is relevant only where the materials "yields" or plastifies. This is just linear elastic beam bending theory - you have two different beam cross sections in either case with two different moments of inertia. See also my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8276173 You could fold a piece of fabric like you do the pizza, and it will not keep its shape.
Depending on the fabric, you most certainly can.
Re: How Gauss Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
#34I totally call bullshit on not being able to crack an egg. Next time I see an egg, I'm trying it.
If that was a troll sir, it was a good one. I wonder how many HNers had to clean their kitchen today ;).
Re: How Gauss Taught Us the Best Way to Hold a Pizza Slice
#35The author's point that "curvature imputes stiffness" conflates several different and distinct mechanisms, and offers an inadequate explanation. For the examples of the pizza, the leaf, and the corrugated sheets, the stiffness is due to the fact that the bending moment of inertia of the cross-section increases when we fold the pizza or the sheet in a particular way [1]. The Theorema Egregium shows that such a structu…
Yeah... well summarised. I kind of enjoyed the article, but while reading it I kept thinking, "This isn't really the reason..."