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Updated: Question of the Week #1


How are the Pancake Theorem and Ham Sandwich Theorem related?

These are real mathematical theorems it easy to look them up on Internet and get the answer to this weeks question.
 

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Login to find out (July 4, 2005 at 6:10pm)
www.daviddarling.info

Given a sandwich in which bread, ham, and cheese (three finite volumes) are mixed up, in any way at all, there is always a flat slice of a knife (a plane) that bisects each of the ham, bread, and cheese.

In other words, however messed up the sandwich-even if it's been in a blender?you can always slice through it in such a way that the two halves have exactly equal amounts, by volume, of the three ingredients.

This theorem generalizes to higher-dimensional ham sandwiches, when it essentially becomes the Borsuk-Ulam theorem: in n-dimensional space in which there are n globs of positive volume, there is always a hyperplane that cuts all the globs exactly in half.
 
Login to find out (July 4, 2005 at 5:23pm)
The link Kapagama gives the correct answer!

Pancake theorem is a two-dimensional version of the Ham Sandwich Theorem.

Here is a more easier answer to understand from algebra.com

The Ham Sanwich Theorem
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The Ham sandwich theorem, also known as the Stone-Tukey theorem in topology in mathematics, states that given n objects in n-dimensional space, it is possible to divide each one in half with a single
(n- 1)-dimensional hyperplane.

Why the name Ham Sandwich Theorem?

It takes its name from the case when n=3 and the three objects of any shape are a chunk of ham and two chunks of bread ? notionally a sandwich ? which can then each be bisected with a single cut (i.e. a plane).

Pancake Theorem
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In two dimensions, it is known as the pancake theorem of having to cut two infinitesimally thin pancakes on a plate each in half with a single cut (i.e. a straight line).
 
Login to find out (July 3, 2005 at 11:30am)
Hehehe... you are every perceptive TheSaadia, but I was looking how theorems are related to each other mathematically.