A Math Nerd's Guide to Slicing Pizza

For me, pizza is often the solution to a stressful day. For a math wiz, however, a pie can serve a very different purpose: it’s a problem waiting to be solved.

There’s a growing body of pizza-related mathematical research. Dr. Eugenia Cheng, for instance, came up with the formula for the perfect pie. A mathematician duo at Louisiana State University figured out how pizza that was sliced off-center would be distributed among two buddies. And as WIRED’s Aatish Bhatia explains, the work of 19th century genius Carl Friedrich Gauss underlies the fold-first-and-then-stuff-in-your-mouth technique most of us employ while consuming that greasy New York slice. Now, a new paper by two mathematicians at the University of Liverpool adds to this incredibly important knowledge: it posits new and intricate ways to divide up a pie in equal proportions.