- Sun. July 23rd 2023
It's been a while since I've written anything, as I've not had anything important to write about, but today I've found an important thing to write about.
How do you score a mango, with as few cuts as possible, such that it is able to invert as much as possible?
I recently bought 30 mangoes, and have thus been eating a steady stream of juicy goodness. To eat mangos, I use the standard technique of scoring them and flipping them inside out. As I've done this over 20 times, I started to wonder how few times I could cut the mango before flipping it out. The standard scoring is usually done in a perfect grid, and doesn't care about the shape of the mango. After trying out random cutting, I realized this required a lot of cuts, which means that there are many small mango chunks, and I prefer to have larger pieces for the perfect mouthfeel 🤪.
We can assume the classic physics assumption, a mango is half a cylinder. In the mental mango model, the mango meat is perfectly solid and is not allowed to bend. The impact this has is that we can only fold exactly along where we cut. From this rule, I believe the first optimal cut is then down the cylindrical side of the mango, so that it can be folded first along this cut. From there we can continually alternate directions, cutting halfway through each cut region. In essence, it's continually splitting the mango in halves, which will lead to the largest chunks in the end,
When we stop assuming that the mango is a cylinder though, how might we go about scoring it? Can we assume that we are able to fold the mango along slightly curved scores? Do non-parallel cuts make the pieces less desirable when eating it? These mango questions haunt me, and as I eat another 10 mangos I will reflect more on carving them.