Artifact
This, my friends, is part math, part food, part art, all deliciousness:
It’s the all edge brownie pan, which I found from my new Favorite Website of All Time, Reasons to Go Broke. Here’s the description from the Amazon page (perfect 5-star rating):
“For corner brownie fans and chewy edge lovers, it’s a dream come true — a gourmet brownie pan that adds two chewy edges to every serving!”
2012 just became the best year ever.
Guiding Questions
- How can we measure the “edginess” of this brownie pan?
- What would happen if you added a couple more horizontal partitions?
- What if you liked the center brownies? Could we make a pan to cater to these monsters?
- Similarly, what if you like brownies with three or four edges?
- Can we make an even “edgier” brownie pan by adjusting the partitions?
- Does the edginess change if we increase or decrease the dimensions of the pan?
Suggested activities
- Develop a metric for the “edginess” of a brownie pan. I’m thinking surface area-to-volume ratio should do the trick.
- Plot the number of partitions against the “edginess”.
- Use Google Sketch Up to make a model of this brilliance.
- (Just go with me on this one) Take a poll. Figure out how many people like 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-, or zero-edged brownies, then challenge the class to make the “ideal” brownie pan.
- Make awesome brownies.
I’d also be willing to bet that someone more skilled than I at Geogebra could make a construction of this, complete with a diagram and a plot of partitions vs. edginess.
The more I think about it, the more I like that “ideal” brownie pan idea. But here’s my question: are there people out there than think two is not the ideal number of brownie edges? My fear is that the “ideal” brownie pan has already been made. And it’s available for $34.95 at Amazon.
emergent math 