You are at a party, serving a square cake (with a thin layer of frosting on the top and edges) to 7 people. They each want an equal amount of the cake, and to make things worse, each want an equal amount of the frosting.

You try to figure out how do do this and eventually give up and simply try to cut the cake so each person gets the same amount of the frosting, ensuring that each cut starts at the center.

When you pass out the cake, you expect complaints, but when there are none, you realize that as luck would have it, you managed to cut into pieces of equal area.

How did this happen, and would it happen with more or fewer people?

Well, shoot, I want a piece of cake, too. (And I should think I deserve one if I'm doing all the work of cutting the damn thing!) So that makes eight of us, and everybody knows cutting a cake into 8 pieces is... well... a piece of cake.

Posted by Jyqm on 2006-10-23 10:40:07