Mathematically Correct Breakfast


Also known as Möbius strip bagel. More room for cream cheese!

The real question is: is it worth it? How much more spreading room do you actually get? Mathematician Antonio R. Vargas has done the calculations, and they get quite complex, veering into calculus. On a webpage hosted by Dalhousie University, Vargas concludes that “the ratio of the surface area exposed by cutting along the two-twist Möbius strip to the area exposed by cutting the bagel straight in half is approximately: 1 + 1/6 (heights/width-height)2.”

To make a long story short, the amount of spreading surface you get depends on the size of your bagel, but it will always be more than if you had cut it in half.

Science Explorer has the full story and instructional photos.

Comments

  1. blf says

    Möbius strip bagel: As a mathematician, QED.

    cream cheese: If you must, keep it in a Klein bottle. That probably won’t deter a certain penguin (it’s the cream cheese that does that).
    I’d be more inclined to make a nice cheese fondue and dip the Möbius strip bagel into that, thus increasing(? maximizing?) the amount of cheese per unit of bagel surface area with minimal effort for a very tasty result. However, this tends to attract incoming penguins…

  2. rq says

    Finally, someone tells me what I’ve been doing wrong.
    Now if only they made real bagels in this gods-forsaken country…

  3. blf says

    What’s a not-real bagel? Sliced beagle? A baguette bent into a circular shape and fried? A lump of unidentified substance with about the consistency, heft, and taste of concrete, with the Dwarveish runes for “BGL∙∙MDM∙RNG∙TRBCHT∙SHT∙∙DSNT∙CNTN∙NTS” chiselled on the bottom?

  4. rq says

    A round-shaped biscuit-type flour-based food product they call ‘baranka’. The small toasty ones are quite alright as an afternoon snack, but even the large soft ones are no bagel.

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