Exercise to the reader: How do you slice the bagel so that you can spread cream cheese continuously along both sides. In other words, can you make a Möbious bagel?
Make a cut through it shaped like a mobius strip - that is, a single 180 degree rotation instead of going the whole 360 degrees shown here.
To think about it another way, imagine if you took a mobius strip and constructed a semicircular lump of bread on the surface, extending it around until it connects back to itself. You've made a bagel!
Now take the mobius strip out of the middle, and the gap it leaves is the cut you're asking to make.
Potentially interesting to anyone with an oven, if you can capture 1% of that market you'll be rich!
I'd suggest raising a few million in seed funding and renting an office in downtown SF. If it doesn't pan out you can pivot into math-related silicone ice cube trays.
My team at work thinks of every excuse possible to get bagels. Recently for a birthday, a work anniversary, and being restacked into new cubes. But this is the best possible excuse for bringing in bagels again on Monday.
Bagel, lox, cucumber and cream cheese has become my new favorite thing lately (bonus points for a squeeze of lemon, capers or some red onion if those things are to be found).
However, I of course have no bagels or bagel accessories on the one day I read about mathematically correct bagels :(
I wonder if it's possible to repeat the process in such a way that you make a chain. I'm trying to visualize how but I'm not certain whether it could only make more links all attached in the same place.
Not necessarily. Just as you could take a chain and stack the links such that the holes lined up, with enough precision, and a strong enough baked good, you could cut the bagel such that there were a chain of linked rings.
Well, if you cut the bagel according to this particular linked torodial method, to produce two links, you’d then be able to perform the traditional bagel slice on one of the linked halves, and that would produce a chain with three links...
But deriving from a single original torus, a chain with an arbitrary or infinite number of links, whereby each individual link is bound to no more than two other links? I’ll have to think about that one...
Just had a brief discussion at work about bagels that started with a complaint about how they're never sliced all the way through.
After a couple minutes of back and forth an epiphany was realized that if they were pre-cut all the way through they'd get jumbled up and then we'd spend way too much time rifling through halves to find a matching one.
There was a fun little challenge on puzzles.stackexchange I think, which relied on the same construction as this article. I couldn’t find it, but it went like this:
“You’re stuck on top of a tall building with nothing but a saw. There’s a ladder fastened to the side of the building, but it’s unfortunately not long enough to reach the ground; in fact it goes about half the height of the building from the top. Challenge is to get on the ground “safely”. You can cut into the ladder with your saw in any way you like and you can assume that the resulting pieces will be rigid, but won’t break under load.”
The problem is then you have two short ladders. You throw your two half ladders off the roof and they don't magically stand end-to-end for you. You have to cut with a twist to ensure the last rungs are entangled with each other so the half-ladders are hooked together. Then you can hang one off the other and reach the ground.
That family must have the best picnics!