Wolfram Demonstrations Project

The pancake-cutting problem is to determine the maximum number of pieces

into which a pancake can be divided by

straight cuts with a knife. The existing

cuts divide a new cut into

segments, each of which divides an existing piece into two pieces. Therefore,

, with initial condition

. Using Mathematica’s RSolve function, we see that the number of pancake pieces after

cuts is

M. Gardner, Martin Gardner’s New Mathematical Diversions from Scientific American, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, pp. 235–239.

F. S. Roberts, Applied Combinatorics, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1984, pp. 198–200.

Contributed by: Robert Dickau

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Pancake-Cutting Problem