Mick Shipman

Mr. Corner
Mathematics
October 20th, 2015
Dave Bakes A Pie
In this problem of the week Dave decides
to bake a pie. After the pie was cooled, Dave was
in a anti-conformist kind of mood so he had
dilema when he was going to cut the pie. He didnt
want to cut the pie normally through the middle,
he wanted to cut it in different variations that
dont intersect in the middle of the pie. Their was
one other thing to this too, the cuts all had to be
straight, no curved cuts. They dont have to be the
same size or equal to each other, they only have to
be straight lines and not meet middle. While
thinking about this in Daves head he wonders, what is the maximum amount of slices you can
get with each amount of cuts. For example, for 4 cuts, what is the largest amount of slices you
can have.
I had a hard time starting this POW. I looked
back and read through the problem statement and
tried to work on from their. Their was diagrams
scattered around the problem statement and I took
the basis from those and continued off of those. After I
began to do this the problem became easier. I drew
out the circles for all 10 cuts, and worked my way from
one cut, two, three and so on. I built off the one I
previously have drawn so my drawing stay consistent.

added one more line to each of the previous circles

and you can see in the diagram to the right. Each new color is a new line that I added that ended
up giving me the correct amount of slices according to the table below.

The pie you see above is for only 8 cuts, I didnt manage to get all the way to 10 in the
time. For the 8 cuts I had 37 slices. If you look at the table you can
see how many cuts can produce a certain number of slices. The first
thing I saw was the connection of the in and the out. If you look at
your previous out, then you add it by you next in, you will get the
next out. For example 11(out)+5(in)=16(new out). Since we had the
in/out table up to 3 cuts I continued this pattern all the way to ten.
My answer for the largest amount of slices with 10 cuts it, 56. I still
have no idea on how this all work, why there can only be this many
slices when there is this many cuts, it is still very confusing to me.
Ive seen others with equations and it makes sense how they work,
but I dont understand how/why they got this equation. The most
basic explanation I could give for why we have these answers is; like
most everything only a certain amount of one thing can fit into a
object. I feel that the same thing applies to this problem, only a
certain amount of slices can be there when you cut it a amount of
times. I truly cant think of a mathematically solution to this
question.
I didnt do any extensions to this problem of the week due to the fact that I finished the
POW only one day before the deadline. Some that I could think of is to transfer this same
question to a different shape, like a square, rectangle, triangle, hexagon and many others and
see if they will have a pattern like the pie problem. Another extension could be to see how many
slices you could get on a three dimentional sphere, will they be the same as a circle?
For this third problem of the week I would grade myself a 8 on a scale from 1 to 10. The
reason I would give myself this grade is because I got what was required, but not to the fullest
and not to the best of my abilities. I didnt manage my time the best during this POW so I ended
up not fully understand this POW, which I knew I could have if I was more diligent. I really
enjoyed this POW, it caught my attention. When I began drawing each circle and the cuts, I
would get frustrated when the slices wouldnt match up with the table, but it wasnt frustration
in a bad way. It made me want to solve it and get the answer even more. I spent a whole hour to
just drawing out the circles and I actually enjoyed it. I know I could have done a better job
though. Im certain if I spent more time on figuring out why all of this was happening I could

have came up with a equation and a answer why. One habit of a mathematician I used to solve
this problem was working systematically. I started with one cut, then two, then three and so on
and if I didnt everything else would be a different answer. I didnt go from one to three, I went
in order of each one. Each time I would only add one more line onto the pervious one, looking
for how many more I added, hoping it would be correct.