RE: Can you cut a cake fairly to solve this middle school math problem?
August 14, 2016 at 9:27 am
(August 14, 2016 at 9:18 am)Anomalocaris Wrote: Hmmm, how about 10 cuts.
Step 1: 2 cuts to shave off the frosting from two opposite sides of the cake.
Step 2: 4 cuts through the cake parallel to the first two cuts to divide the cake, the frosting on top, and the fronting on the other two sides of the cake into 5 equal portions.
Step 3: 4 more cuts to divide the frosting removed in step 1 into 5 equal portions.
That seems like too many cuts for an elegant solution, but is the best I have at the moment.
I see. So you don't need to remove the frosting from two of the opposite sides in Step1 since you'd leave an equal amount for each of the five pieces anyway. Then in Step 3 you could line up the top bit of frosting and the two side bits to make a rectangle the same width as the top square of frosting by a length of that increased by the two side bits.
The actual minimum number of total cuts needed is
