Being a math whiz never tasted so sweet.
Pizza Hut is holding a contest where the grand prize is a whole lot of pie — $1600 worth, to be exact. In honour of Pi Day, the restaurant chain is offering three lucky individuals 3.14 years’ worth of pizza to enjoy.
There are two caveats, however: you must live within the continental United States (sorry, Canadian readers), and you must be exceptionally good at math.
At 8 a.m. EST on March 14, 2016, the company’s blog will post three mathematical problems ranging in difficulty from high school to PhD level. Contestants will have until midnight of the same day to solve the questions and post their answers; the first person to get each question correct will be eligible to win a $1,600 gift card. (For those playing along at home, that could potentially mean either three separate prize winners or one very fortunate math prodigy with $4,800 worth of melted cheese under their belt.)
Once announced, winners will have only 24 hours to claim their prize.
The problems were created by Princeton University math professor John H. Conway and are so under wraps that not even Pizza Hut knows what to expect.
“Pi may be irrational, but free pizza is anything but,” Conway quipped regarding the competition. “I’m eager to challenge America with these problems and find the next great pizza-loving mathematician that can solve them.”
The 14th of March has been dubbed National Pi Day by math enthusiasts, as it shares its date with the first three digits of the billions-digit long mathematical constant, Pi (π).
