Such a numerical procession is called an integer sequence, an orderly list of whole numbers that follow a rule or pattern, like prime numbers: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13 … ; or even numbers: 0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12 … The Fibonacci sequence — 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…; (in which each number is the sum of the preceding two numbers) — are related to structures in nature: the growth patterns of flower petals, the chambers of a nautilus cell, the branching of trees or, as discovered last year, vortices of light.For Dr. Sloane the pancake partitioning process brought to mind a possible application, though only as fodder for a joke. “I can’t help think that some gerrymandering rule might appreciate these constructions,” he said.‘Infinitely far away!’Of all the shapes the researchers considered, the constrained A was “the most difficult to analyze,” Dr. Sloane said. “Even the 13-piece solution for two cuts required a computer to find.” The difficulty arose because the pancake pieces are often microscopically tiny. As the authors described in the paper, some regions were “barely visible to the naked eye” and approached “the precision limit of the computer.”The computer helped them “grope in the dark,” Dr. Sloane said. Experimentation by hand was another good source of ideas, he found. Using the analog skill of visualization, he went through a lot of scratch paper making drawings. Here is sketch of the initial pancake problem in the simplest case:
First seen: 2026-01-25 22:55
Last seen: 2026-01-25 23:56