This Week's Math Challenge

[akaya]

(No one ever "figured out" the right answer for that insane math challenge wtih the squares/triangles, btw)

Time to help Eddie once again! ;D

Mr. Ratio and 5 friends want to share a 9-inch square cake with icing. How can he cut the cake so that each person receives an equal share of both cake and icing? (Hint: Don't forget the icing on the

Comments

[musicsangel]

is that possible?

six people to one cake...

[neatomicheal]

that's too much cake for six people, just don't use the whole thing! =p

yes we did

[terragreyling]

I had consulted 3 professors of mathmatics and they all gave me same answer

[anonymous]

Just cut the sides of the cake so you take out the icing on the sides. After that, just cut the cake in 6 equal parts. After that, use the same knife to murder Eddie's teacher.

Why can I read this again?

[koi_langrisser]

Using rough numbers, and using the logic that I use (not the logic from Eddie's age level) it would go something like this....

The icing around the cake is 36in in length (9*4 or the perimeter of the cake) so each person will get 6in of icing from around the sides of the cake.

As for the cake itself, it has an area of 81in, divide it by 6 to determine that each person will get a piece that has an area of 13.5 (*note* you didn't give depth so this won't be exact). Since it's a square cake we assume that each person will get a square piece so if we take the square root of 13.5 we can determine the side length of each piece of cake for each person. It comes out to roughly 3.67in per side of each piece of cake for each person.

Now this seems rather number intensive and I'm sure there's a simple answer I'm not seeing as I always overlook the simple solutions.

[koi_langrisser]

Hmm, are we to assume the cake has dimensions of 9x9x9? Or does the depth not matter?

Cake

[terragreyling]

Depth would be very important to make sure that everyone got the same amount of icing....

Re: Cake

[koi_langrisser]

Not really. In order to uniformly distribute the icing, you can remove it from the outer edges and then divide that up evenly amongst the people then when the cake is cut everyone has the same icing and cake.