[imagesource:safacts]

Today is World Pizza Day. Do we need to say more?

As the country braces itself for the SONA on Thursday afternoon, World Pizza Day gives us a glimmer of hope in this otherwise sulky nation. Nothing lifts the spirits as much as the ring of your doorbell and the smell of warm pizza. The strange chemistry in our brains and bodies seems to be geared toward the sort of comfort food that claims pizza as its Mandela. You just have to love it. It’s science.

But pizza is more than just an emotional high-five, it’s the basis for a mathematical theorem too.

“In elementary geometry, the theorem states the equality of two areas that arise when one partitions a disk in a certain way.The theorem is so called because it mimics a traditional pizza slicing technique. It shows that if two people share a pizza sliced into 8 pieces (or any multiple of 4 greater than 8), and take alternating slices, then they will each get an equal amount of pizza, irrespective of the central cutting point.”

It’s called the pizza theorem, and it basically means pizza is always fair. It’s also load-shedding-proof, and if you are lucky enough to live in the Cape Town area, Butler’s keeps the fires stoked even as the suburbs go dark. Since we’re learning, did you know that the same lady who founded the first culinary school in South Africa, Lesley Faull, also came up with their recipe? They even have a pizza named after our very own mad scientist-in-chief, The Rotherham (bacon, feta, salami). Here it is, tucked in between a Meaty Foursome and the Big Cheese. Off course.

Can you smell the history and mathematical relevance, or did we have you at World Pizza Day?

[source:sur&butlers]