Question

A cylindrical cake is to be cut into 16 equal pieces. What is the minimum number of cuts required to do so

Answer 1

Step-by-step explanation:

cake with no slices has 1 piece. When you draw the first line cut, you cut it into 2 pieces. After that, in order to maximize the number of slices, each line cut that you make should intersect each other line cut previously made. If you calculate the number of pieces made this way, you end up with

p(n)=n(n+1)2+1

Where p is the number of pieces and n is the number of cuts made. As you can see, the first p(n) that exceeds or equals 16 is p(5)=16. So the answer is 5.