Related papers: Packing a cake into a box
We consider a new kind of straight and shifted plane partitions/Young tableaux --- ones whose diagrams are no longer of partition shape, but rather Young diagrams with boxes erased from their upper right ends. We find formulas for the…
It is a $300$ year old counterintuitive observation of Prince Rupert of Rhine that in cube a straight tunnel can be cut, through which a second congruent cube can be passed. Hundred years later P. Nieuwland generalized Rupert's problem and…
Classic cake-cutting algorithms enable people with different preferences to divide among them a heterogeneous resource (``cake''), such that the resulting division is fair according to each agent's individual preferences. However, these…
Bob cuts a pizza into slices of not necessarily equal size and shares it with Alice by alternately taking turns. One slice is taken in each turn. The first turn is Alice's. She may choose any of the slices. In all other turns only those…
The classic cake cutting problem concerns the fair allocation of a heterogeneous resource among interested agents. In this paper, we study a public goods variant of the problem, where instead of competing with one another for the cake, the…
A classic three-jug puzzle asks, given three jugs $A$, $B$, and $C$ with fixed maximum capacities, with jug $A$ filled with wine to its maximum capacity, whether is it possible to divide the wine into two halves by pouring it from one jug…
We study searching and sorting in rounds motivated by a fair division question: given a cake cutting problem with $n$ players, compute a fair allocation in at most $k$ rounds of interaction with the players. Rounds interpolate between the…
In the March 2025 issue of Pour la Science, Jean-Paul Delahaye described a wonderful solution to the following problem: How many ways can you divide a 3 by 2n rectangle into two connected, congruent pieces? We show that this problem can be…
We study the fair allocation of a cake, which serves as a metaphor for a divisible resource, under the requirement that each agent should receive a contiguous piece of the cake. While it is known that no finite envy-free algorithm exists in…
A compact packing is a set of non-overlapping discs where all the holes between discs are curvilinear triangles. There is only one compact packing by discs of size $1$. There are exactly $9$ values of $r$ which allow a compact packing by…
Cutting a cake is a metaphor for the problem of dividing a resource (cake) among several agents. The problem becomes non-trivial when the agents have different valuations for different parts of the cake (i.e. one agent may like chocolate…
Every day, 34 million Chicken McNuggets are sold worldwide. At most McDonalds locations in the United States today, Chicken McNuggets are sold in packs of 4, 6, 10, 20, 40, and 50 pieces. However, shortly after their introduction in 1979…
We prove that curves indicated in the title exist. This results answers to a question posed by A.G.Vitushkin about 30 years ago. We also discuss the minimal number of boundary components of a curve in the unit ball passing through the…
What is the smallest number of pieces that you can cut an n-sided regular polygon into so that the pieces can be rearranged to form a rectangle? Call it r(n). The rectangle may have any proportions you wish, as long as it is a rectangle.…
We consider the well-studied cake cutting problem in which the goal is to identify a fair allocation based on a minimal number of queries from the agents. The problem has attracted considerable attention within various branches of computer…
Two planar sets are circularly separable if there exists a circle enclosing one of the sets and whose open interior disk does not intersect the other set. This paper studies two problems related to circular separability. A linear-time…
Pancake Flipping is the problem of sorting a stack of pancakes of different sizes (that is, a permutation), when the only allowed operation is to insert a spatula anywhere in the stack and to flip the pancakes above it (that is, to perform…
This article is a gentle introduction to the mathematical area known as circle packing, the study of the kinds of patterns that can be formed by configurations of non-overlapping circles. The first half of the article is an exposition of…
We study the problem of fairly allocating a divisible resource in the form of a graph, also known as graphical cake cutting. Unlike for the canonical interval cake, a connected envy-free allocation is not guaranteed to exist for a graphical…
It is known that $\sum\limits_{i =1}^\infty {1/ i^2}={\pi^2/6}$. Meir and Moser asked what is the smallest $\epsilon$ such that all the squares of sides of length $1$, $1/2$, $1/3$, $\ldots$ can be packed into a rectangle of area…