I don’t mind the occasional joke in an hn thread. I’ve made several myself. But I’m disappointed that this thread is seemingly all jokes and no actual discussion of the article.
I’m no mathematician, but as best I can tell, this is describing a novel approach to the “lazy caterers problem”: “Given an integer n, denoting the number of cuts that can be made on a pancake, find the maximum number of pieces that can be formed by making n cuts.” [1]
Their method was to use weirdly shaped, sometimes infinite knives, computing optimal arrangements, and recognizing the resulting region counts as known integer sequences.
Top comments includes, comments on a university course, pancake recipes and questions about basketball matches against the dead musician Prince.