Sharing a pizza: bisecting masses with two cuts
Abstract
Assume you have a pizza consisting of four ingredients (e.g., bread, tomatoes, cheese and olives) that you want to share with your friend. You want to do this fairly, meaning that you and your friend should get the same amount of each ingredient. How many times do you need to cut the pizza so that this is possible? We will show that two straight cuts always suffice. More formally, we will show the following extension of the well-known Ham-sandwich theorem: Given four mass distributions in the plane, they can be simultaneously bisected with two lines. That is, there exist two oriented lines with the following property: let be the region of the plane that lies to the positive side of both lines and let be the region of the plane that lies to the negative side of both lines. Then contains exactly half of each mass distribution.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1904.02502,
title = {Sharing a pizza: bisecting masses with two cuts},
author = {Luis Barba and Alexander Pilz and Patrick Schnider},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1904.02502},
year = {2019}
}