G'day all.
Quoting Adrian Neumann
I often wonder how many cuts you need to divide a steak in n pieces.
One, if the cut is allowed to be curved and self-intersecting. I think that the spirit of the problem, though is encapsulated in this question: Given a circle, what is the maximum number of pieces that you can divide it into by performing n straight cuts? This is a great problem to set undergraduates, because if you work out some small values of n on paper, you get: n #pieces 0 1 1 2 2 4 3 7 Most undergrads will stall at this point trying to work out how to place the third line to get 8 pieces, and probably come up with an incorrect justification for why it should be 2^n. The details are here: http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/A000124 Cheers, Andrew Bromage