My Science School

Have you ever wondered how the food that lands up on your plate is made? No, we are not talking about the journey of rice or other materials from the time they are sowed in fields till the time they are cooked into food. Instead, we are talking about how food is prepared in the kitchen, either by those cooking at home, or the chefs who prepare the food in hotels.

Culinary math is here

Culinary math is an emerging field that combines kitchen science with mathematics. At the heart of this subject is the understanding that appealing meals aren’t made by just combining ingredients in a haphazard manner. A great cook, in fact, has a lot in common with a scientist and a mathematician.

This is because what is made to look carefree and spontaneous in cookery shows is actually the result of years of hard work and practice. Cooking routines include simple to complex mathematical calculations. From counting portions to increasing the yield when required, there are numbers at play during various stages of the meal.

Computation and geometry

While addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions are involved while computing and working with the ingredients, ratios, percentages, and yields come into the picture when deciding the total amount of a food to be cooked, and then distributing them to people.

When working with spherical roti doughs and cubic paneer portions, a cook is knowingly or unknowingly dabbling with geometry. And by being familiar with units and abbreviations of measurements, and fluently converting them from one system to another, the person who is cooking is also able to borrow from cuisines from abroad.

A number of courses in culinary math has started to develop around the world, targeting students who aim to become chefs in high-end hotels. For, even though it might seem as if a famous chef is just sprinkling a bit of this, grabbing a pinch of that, and garnishing with a little bit of something else, there is a lot of maths applied to it, knowing which makes it easier.

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What do you do when you find yourself in a sticky situation and you need to find a solution? Do you try to add some element to it in the hope that it would improve the overall situation? If so, you are not alone. A recent study shows that when people are looking to improve a situation, idea or object, an overwhelming majority of them try to add something to it, irrespective of whether it helps or not. This also means that people never stop to think and remove something as a solution, even if it might actually work.

In order to understand this better, think about all the adults working from home during the ongoing pandemic. You must have noticed that many of them, maybe even your parents, have complained about attending endless meetings that eat into their schedule, giving them little time to do actual work. This is a classic case of adding more and more meetings to make up for office environment, with little thought going into whether all those meetings are actually required. A simpler solution might have been to stick to existing schedules or maybe even cutting down some meetings (consider the fatigue involved in video calls as opposed to face-to-face encounters) and making communication within an organisation more efficient.

In a paper that featured in Nature, researchers from the University of Virginia looked at why people overlook subtractive ideas altogether in all kinds of context. They stated that additive ideas come more quickly and easily, whereas subtractive ones need more effort. As we are living in a fast-paced world where we are likely to implement the first ideas that occur to us, this means that additive solutions are largely accepted, without even considering subtractive ones.

Self-reinforcing effect

This further has a self-reinforcing effect. As we rely more and more on additive ideas, they become more easily accessible to us. With time, this becomes a habit, meaning our brains have a strong urge to look for additive ideas. As a result, the ability to improve the world through subtractive strategies is lost on us.

While the interesting finding of the research, which has overlaps between behavioural science and engineering, could have plenty of application across sectors, researchers believe it could be particularly useful in how we harness technology.

Less is more

The results highlight humanity’s overwhelming focus on always adding, even when the correct answer might actually to be subtract something. While this holds true for everything from people struggling with overfull schedules to institutions finding it hard to adhere to more and more rules, it also shows how we are inherently geared towards exhausting more of our planet’s resources. A minimalist approach of less is more might word wonders in a lot of situations.

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Have you ever wondered if there is more to knots than meets your eye when tying your shoelaces? If so, here’s your answer: there’s a theory in mathematics called knot theory that delves into exactly this.

Study of closed curves

Knot theory is the study of closed curves in three dimensions and their possible deformations without one part cutting through another. Imagine a string that is interlaced and looped in any manner. If this string is then joined at the ends, then it is a knot.

The least number of crossings that occur even as a knot is moved in all possible ways denotes a knot’s complexity. This minimum number of crossings is called the order of the knot and the simplest possible knot has an order of three.

More crossings, more knots

As the order increases, the number of distinguishable knots increases manifold. While the number of knots with an order 13 is around 10,000, that number jumps to a million for an order of 16.

German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss took the first steps towards a mathematical theory of knots around 1800. The first attempt to systematically classify knots came in the second half of the 19th Century from Scottish mathematician-physicist Peter Guthrie Tait.

While the knot theory continued to develop for the next 100 years or so as a pure mathematical tool, it then started finding utility elsewhere as well. A breakthrough by New Zealand mathematician Vaughan Jones in 1984 allowed American mathematical physicist Edward Witten to discover a connection between knot theory and hyperbolic geometry. Jones, Witten, and Thurston all won the Fields medal, considered to be among the highest prizes for mathematics, for their contributions.

Many applications

These developments in the last few decades has meant that knot theory has found applications in biology, chemistry, mathematical physics, and even cosmology. Who knows, the possibilities with knots could possibly be endless.

 

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