Professor Iacono's chocolate-wrapping research featured in Science


A recent article "Sweet Inspiration" by Barry Cipra in the journal Science describes Professor Iacono's recent results in computational confectionery theory with collaborators Erik Demaine (MIT), Martin Demaine (MIT) and Stefan Langerman (ULB). In a recent result announced in Vienna, Professor Iacono and his collaborators have discovered a better way to wrap the famous spherical Austrian Mozartkugel chocolates than the tradtional rectangular foil.

Cipra writes: "The computational chocolatiers found that they could achieve a 0.1% savings over current practice with an equilateral triangle whose area turns out to be approximately 1.9986π2. (The exact value for 1.9986… is a messy formula involving, for no obvious reason, the square root of 57.) ... The potential reduction in the carbon footprint associated with Mozartkugel materials and manufacturing, they joke, 'partially solves the global-warming problem and consequently the little-reported but equally important chocolate-melting problem.'"