Photo Credit: Flickr User "rob_rob2001" - Some Rights Reserved
All right, so let’s change the situation a bit. You are your two roommates get up one fall Saturday in college and head to the fridge. You open it up to notice some leftover pizza from the night before. 5 pieces. 3 people. Each wants (and quite frankly expects) an equal share of the pizza pie. So, how do you figure this one out?
A nice mathy solution would be nice, but if you have a practical solution (by practical, I mean not crunching numbers), then offer it and we will try to fasten some number-crunching to model your idea.
Post your ideas in the comments.
This is only tangentially related to this post, but could be extremely pertinent to your geometry teaching: have you heard of the pizza theorem? It’s certainly not trivial mathematics, but the results are as recent as 2009. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_theorem
It’s a testament to the fact that classical geometry is still relevant to mathematics today.