School of Mathematics Seminars and Lectures

Fewest Pieces of Cake, and Isoperimetric Square

by Prof. Hyman Bass (University of Michigan, USA,)

Sunday, June 22, 2014 from to (Asia/Kolkata)
at Colaba Campus ( AG-66 )
Description Suppose that $s$ students want to equally share $c$ cakes. What is the smallest
number of cake pieces, $p(c, s)$, needed to achieve this fair distribution? We
will derive a formula for $p(c, s)$ and describe two different distribution
schemes that achieve this. One of them is associated with a square tiling of
a $c\times s$ rectangle $R$, and we shall see that this square tiling is
``isoperimetric'' in the sense that it has smallest ``perimeter'' among all
square tilings of $R$. I will describe a generalized version of this problem
that is still open