1736 Math Dish

I had an interesting and humbling experience recently.
I got fooled by a pizza.
The scenario. I was at a local pizza parlor, a place called Dirty Daves. The owner Dirty and I go way back, as I actually helped him open the first Dirty Dave's on Pacific Avenue some 40 years ago. In the time I worked for him I cooked and purveyed any number of pizzas.
So you'd think I know from pizza.
The other night I took my dad in for dinner and order two pizzas, his a plain pepperoni, mine a Gay 90s special, which includes sausage, onion, pepperoni, and cashews. If you've never tried it, it's delicious, and both less and more nutty than it sounds.
The young woman at the counter suggested I could save money by ordering one giant 15-inch half-and-half pizza. Less cost and "more pizza real estate" as she put it. My brain did a quick calculation based on the apparent sizes of two 10-inch pizzas and one 15-inch pizza, threw in a little arrogance, and concluded she was young and callow and didn't know what she was talking about.
I was a veteran pizza expert after all. Turned out I was also old and smug and due for a comeuppance. And just desserts usually don’t have cashews.
When I got home, I did the math. The area of a circle is pi times the radius squared. A 10-inch pizza is 5 x 5 x pi or about 78.5. Two pizzas are 157 square inches.
Or round inches in this case.
The 15-inch pizza is 7.5 x 7.5 x pi, which is 176.625 inches.
Um...
A wonderful ego-adjusting experience. The young person showed me the value of pi, in all three ways; math, pizza, and humble.
America ya gotta love it.