Yesterday, my friends and I spent a delightful evening at Dewey's Pizzeria in Grandview. When we were ordering pizzas, two friends, Roland and David, each ordered a small (eleven inch) pizza. The waitress said, "It would be cheaper if you bought a 17 inch pizza and split it."
I pondered, cheaper, maybe, but would they get the same amount of pizza?
So I pulled out a napkin, grabbed a sharpie, and did a little bistromathics.
It was a simple calculation, finding the surface area of an 11 inch pizza and comparing that to half the surface area of a 17 inch pizza*, but the activity drew a few exasperated sighs.
I say, why accept a premise on faith when you can prove or disprove it with a few simple mathematical tools? If we let enough of those moments slip by, we become slaves to hearsay and speculation.
Sprocketplug
[dictated but not read in the penthouse of an ivory tower]
* circle with diameter 11 inches has surface area
= π * r^2 = π*5.5^2 ≅ 95.03 in^2
circle with diameter 17 inches has surface area
= π * r^2 = π*8.5^2 ≅ 226.98 in^2
So half that would be approximately 113.5 in^2
3 comments:
It was, indeed, a stunning display of mathematical napkinry.
I'm dang proud of you, man. I personally think all pizza places should publish square cm of cheesey goodness instead of those silly diameters. Then we could all leave our slide-rules at home. Beneficial side effect: it may also promote the proliferation of elliptical pizza pies.
Alex
oh man, i would love me an elliptical pie. i'm surprised no one has made that. the name escapes me, but a chain had a rectangle pizza (it used to be in RW next to the movie theatre in the mall inside Kmart . . . oh wow, musta drank those brain cells dry . . . ). at any rate, i'm going to open a chain of elliptical pizzas and name them the "peter e. sprangers, e stands for "eff off, bitch", pizza chain company incorporated but not affiliated"
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