Even if you only vaguely remember taking math in your formative years, you’ll recall calculating the area of circles, maybe wondering what application this could ever have to your future real life. Well, do you eat pizza? Knowing how to calculate the area of a circle in square inches is a very important skill that will serve you well… as long as you like leftover pizza.

Sure, most of us could probably calculate the size of different pizzas, but did it ever occur to you to do this kind of math?

This whole project started when NPR’s Quoctrung Bui was out to lunch with an engineer, and learned that a twelve-inch pizza is, in terms of area, more than twice as big as an eight-inch pizza. What? That’s how the Pizza Calculator was born. Using data from food-ordering site GrubHub/Seamless, the dynamic graph calculates the price per square inch of various sizes of pizza based on data from across the country. You’ll have to go to NPR’s site to use it, though.

You shouldn’t always get the bigger pizza, though. A bigger pizza isn’t a better deal if you don’t want that much pizza in the first place, or if you don’t have a refrigerator handy.

74,476 Reasons You Should Always Get The Bigger Pizza [NPR] (Thanks, Amy!)

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