Calculate The Surface Area Of Pizza To Locate The Best Deal?

If you’ve ever stood at the grocery store trying to figure out if it was a better deal to buy two smaller pizzas or one larger pizza, this story is for you. What happens when a personal finance blogger gets offered two 8″ pizzas instead of one 12″? Geometry! From The Binary Dollar:

After doing some quick mental math (area of a circle = pi*radius

. Two 8

pizzas = 2*pi*(4)

= 32*pi square inches, One 12

pizza = pi*(6)

= 36*pi square inches), I told her we’d be missing out on over 12 square inches of pizza, so we’d rather just have the one 12

pizza. She complied, and as a nice bonus (probably because she was impressed by my quick geometry skills), she let us have the extra 8

pizza anyways. Score one for geometry!

We doubt the part about the waitress being impressed by geometry skills, but the rest of it sounds about right. —MEGHANN MARCO

Geometry Saved Me Money [Binary Dollar]
(Photo: Dustin P. Smith)

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