The Dumbells Soup Company makes its own cylindrical tin cans. The cans have a diameter of 3 inches and they are 3.5 inches tall.

Dumbells produces the cans by cutting out circles and rectangles from a large sheet of tin. The "wasted tin" between circles and rectangles that they cut out is thrown away. The company can order sheets of arbitrary length, but they are always 6 feet wide.

The operations manager just received an order for 100 cans. He should order the shortest length sheet of tin he can, because he is tasked with minimizing the wasted tin.

What length should the manager order?

(In reply to What sized rectangles? by Avin)

Hmmm... assuming we would have to weld the top and bottoms anyway, it would be hard to object on the grounds of the rectangles not being "Whole". Could we get much milage with the rectangles being at most two pieces? What if you were allowed to cut the big rectangles into two triangles, like the cardboard siding on butter biscuit rolls?

Probably not what was intended, but awfully clever "thinking out side the rectangle" :-) 

Posted by owl on 2004-11-13 07:06:12