The Best Way to Cut a Cake for Three People

There’s tea for two. And, also, two for tea. But what about cake for three? A new video making rounds on the internet shows that three people can have their cake and definitely eat it too.

The video comes to us from Numberphile, a digit-driven web channel concerned with all things mathematical. They tackle the tough stuff: explainers of four dimensional shape making, quaternions, the largest prime number ever recorded on paper. This week, they dissected how to break down a cake amongst three.

In the video's hypothetical, we follow Alice, Bob, and Charlie, three generous and egalitarian friends who seek to divide a recently acquired cake equally. The division process explained in the video feels arbitrary and unnecessarily complicated, but isn’t that just all math? Nonetheless, the narrator effectively explains how to divide what seems like a dry and crumbly cake into three even portions:

So, time to put this knowledge to good use: bake a cake and call up two friends! We have just the recipes to get you started:

Would you try your hand at the tri-cutting technique? Let us know in the comments.