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Beginning as usual with a puzzle for the month but this time from Transum Subscriber Nigel Fearn. He contacted me to say how a good puzzle just cropped up the other day and is probable one we are all familiar with in a practical situation. The puzzle comes out of a need to carefully and accurately cut the last piece of a cake into two equal pieces.
Imagine a delicious coffee and walnut cake (my personal favourite) that has almost completely been eaten except for a lonely slice that needs to be cut in two. Rather than cutting the cake in the normal way, from circle centre to the midpoint of the arc (which can be tricky), you decide to cut it in a direction perpendicular to that. So you are not cutting the cake horizontally but vertically so that the centre of the original cake is on one side of your cut and the arc of the remaining slice is on the other.
So the question is where do you make the cut so as two get two equal volumes of mouth-watering cake?
Solutions to the Puzzle of the Month are available to subscribers only.
For many more mathematical puzzles visit the Transum Puzzles page.
