Almost anyone who has spent time cutting a pancake with an exotic knife will acknowledge that it can be interesting. This study, also, acknowledges that cutting a pancake with an exotic knife can be interesting:
“Cutting a Pancake with an Exotic Knife,” David O.H. Cutler and Neil J. A. Sloane, arXiv:2511.15864, 2025. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report:
In the first chapter of their classic book Concrete Mathematics, Graham, Knuth, and Patashnik consider the maximum number of pieces that can be obtained from a pancake by making n cuts with a knife blade that is straight, or bent into a V, or bent twice into a Z. We extend their work by considering knives, or “cookie-cutters”, of even more exotic shapes, including a k-armed V, a chain of k connected line segments, a long-legged version of one of the letters A, E, L, M, T, W, or X, a convex polygon, a circle, a figure 8, a pentagram, a hexagram, or a lollipop.