Today, the »Streuspanne Lexicon« continues with the entry »W wie Wurstkatastrophe« [German Term for: S for Sausage Disaster]. Our lexicon is not a regular series, but a section to refer to small explanations without having to go on and on in a separate series. The podcast team explains a term briefly and concisely in just a few minutes.
The new entry in our spread lexicon deals with an expression that at first glance sounds more like a snack bar than mathematics: the sausage catastrophe.
But it's not about breakfast and certainly not about meat – it's purely about math. So this sausage is 100 percent vegan – and 100 percent nerdy.
We explain why balls that look like sausages suddenly cause a catastrophe – and what the whole thing has to do with convex hulls, clustering and optimal packing.
Sounds weird? It is. And yet there is real mathematics behind it, with applications ranging from materials research, which involves the arrangement of atoms in crystals, to cryptography, where the optimal arrangement of spheres is important for data encryption.
In addition, nature shows that efficient packing is not just theory: bees build their honeycombs in a perfect hexagonal shape, which is the 2D version of optimal sphere packing. These connections between mathematics and nature make the sausage catastrophe a fascinating topic for anyone interested in the curiosities of mathematics.
Many thanks to the loyal listener for the suggestion for this lexicon entry – do you have any curious terms or mathematical questions that we should include in the »Streuspanne« podcast? Then please write to us at presse(at)itwm.fraunhofer.de – we look forward to your ideas!
If you have found your way here from a regular episode: jump back quickly, that's where it continues!
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Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM