If you had to choose one of the many papers written by mathematicians about cakes, and you had to choose that one at random, you might choose this one:
“Better Ways to Cut a Cake,” Steven J. Brams, Michael A. Jones and Christian Klamler, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, December 2006, vol. 53, no. 11, pp. 1314-21. (Thanks to Penny Grace for bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain:
“In this paper we show how mathematics can illuminate the study of cake-cutting in ways that have practical implications. Specifically, we analyze cake-cutting algorithms that use a minimal number of cuts (n – 1 if there are n people), where a cake is a metaphor for a heterogeneous, divisible good, whose parts may be valued differently by different people.”