Sunday, January 29, 2012

How map is like a pizza

Hello and welcome to facts for Hank & John (I just used that to say that the two can be interchangeable) where I put some research after watching their video.
I saw a video about how all map are distorted in some way and so are ideas... well that idea have to do with eating pizza. Seriously.


The theorem that shows the inevitable failures of cartography was derived by Carl Frederick Gauss, a remarkable mathematician. And the theorem is also remarkable in that it's called a remarkable theorem. Or in Latin, Theorema Egregium. Now the theorem says that the curvature, which measures how curvy the surface is like flat surface has none and sphere have positive ones and saddles have a negative ones, doesn't matter how hard you twist and bend them. Now there's some leeway here and there but what it means that you can't put a surface of a sphere into a flat space without distortion.  That's comes out of basic Gaussian geometry. 


Now a pizza is a flat surface. It means it has no curvature. When you bend your slice of pizza horizontally along the radius, some plane (or the a slice of that slice) will start have some curvature and as all these curvature had to cancel out, the pizza will become rigid in direction in the perpendicular to the fold which is perfect for eating. That's why cardboard boxes have weird squiggly paper inside two flat pieces. The form becomes rigid.


That's all for my fact maybe I'll write more. Goodbye! 

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