In the Winter/Spring 2016 issue of American Institute of Mathematics’ MTCircular, UNL math Ph.D. alumna and past NebraskaMATH instructor Katie Haymaker prepares the “Pancake Problem” with the cooperation of the Philadelphia Area Math Teachers’ Circle leadership. Haymaker is now an assistant professor of mathematics at Villanova University.
The Pancake Problem is a sorting problem with connections to computer science and DNA rearrangements, which leads to discussions of algorithms, sequences and the usefulness of approximations and bounds. For this session, it is useful for each table to have at least four small disks of different sizes to simulate pancakes.
Read about the problem here:
http://go.unl.edu/nm_pancakes