Perfect Slice

Mathematicians solve a 40-year-old shapeslicing dilemma

- Max Springer

In 1986 Belgian mathematician Jean Bourgain posed a seemingly simple question that continued to puzzle researchers for decades. No matter how you deform a convex shape-consider shaping a ball of clay into a watermelon, a football or a long noodle-will you always be able to slice a cross section bigger than a certain size? A paper by Bo'az Klartag of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and Joseph Lehec of the University of Poitiers in France, posted to the preprint site arXiv.org, has finally provided a definitive answer: yes.