Before Christmas, I asked my Pre algebra students why we cut our pies and pizzas into 8 slices. While there is the occasional rebel slicing the pies into 6 slices and some pizzas into 12 slices, the vast majority of us seem to favor 8. Is it because we all love the number 8? What's going on here? For the most part, they still haven't told me.
This sort of slicing preference is a classic example of something we do, yet without realizing the math behind the intuition to make our lives easier. It's so obvious to us that we fail to see. Let's take a closer look. Imagine cutting a pizza - where do you make the first cut? Why do you make the cut there?
Now I know that some of you, most likely the rebels among you, may refuse to see what's natural and insist on making your first pizza cut on the edge. This pattern results in various sized strips of pizza with varying amounts of crust to pizza ratio. It's practically chaos. Let's remember that we are analyzing a natural non rebellious habit - our first cut on a pizza is cutting it in half.
In fact, every cut that we make on a pizza cuts the pizza in half. Even when we are slicing the pizza into 6 or 12 slices. However, there is something about cutting until we have 8 symmetrical slices that brings this to the next level. Can you figure it out?