English

The $\infty$-Oreo$^{^\circledR}$

History and Overview 2026-04-02 v1 Combinatorics Dynamical Systems

Abstract

What happens when a food product contains a version of itself? The Oreo Loaded -- a cookie whose filling contains real Oreo cookie crumbs -- can be viewed as the result of mixing a Mega Stuf Oreo into a Mega Stuf Oreo. Iterating this process yields a sequence of increasingly self-referential cookies; taking the limit gives the \infty-Oreo. We model the iteration as an affine recurrence on the creme fraction of the filling, prove convergence, and compute the limit exactly: the stuf of the \infty-Oreo is approximately 95.8%95.8\%~creme and 4.2%4.2\%~wafer. We then extend the framework to pairs of foods that reference each other, deriving a coupled recursion whose fixed point defines a \emph{bi-\infty food}, and illustrate the construction with M\&M Cookies and Crunchy Cookie M\&M's. Finally, we classify \infty-foods by the number of foods in the recursion and introduce \emph{homological foods}, whose recursive structure is governed by cycles in a directed graph of commercially available products. We close with a conjecture. All products used in this paper can be purchased at a supermarket.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.00435,
  title  = {The $\infty$-Oreo$^{^\circledR}$},
  author = {Vicente Bosca},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.00435},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, 13 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:47:32.090Z