If you look at the back of a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes Glazed Donut Holes cereal, you'll find a startling claim:
Matt Parker investigated and came to three remarkable conclusions:
- Kellogg's has a typo in their formula for the surface area of a donut.
- He is the kind of guy who will pay someone to record of a video of himself eating a bowl of cereal."
- Despite the typo, Kellogg's is right!
All this and more is revealed in the following video of Parker's investigation:
Kellogg's claim would not be true if the thickness of the glaze layer was the same between the spherical donut hole and toroidal donut geometries. But the reason Kellogg's claim is able to hold is because they really loaded up the amount of glaze onto their cereal-based donut hole structure, making its coating much thicker than what can be achieved by applying the same mass of sugary glaze spread out over the larger surface area of a donut (or in math terms, a "torus"). In effect, they maxxed out the ratio of glaze to cereal.
But the more amazing thing is that Kellogg's has not fixed the typo in the formula for the surface area of a donut-shaped object, even though is has been printed on every box of its Glazed Donut Holes cereals for more than a year after it was first reported!
Labels: math
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