Optimal potatoes

At my house, no Thanksgiving dinner is complete without mathed potatoes. To make mathed potatoes, start by boiling the potatoes until they're soft, which will take about 15 to 20 minutes. After you drain them and let them cool slightly, you're ready for the math. Take one potato and divide evenly to get half a potato, plus half a potato. Then divide the halves into fourths and the fourths into eights and so on. Eventually, you will have a completely mathed potato that looks like this. Once you have proven this result for one potato, you can apply it to other potatoes without going through the entire process. That's how math works. While I prefer refined and precise methods for mathing a potato, many people just apply brute force algorithms. You can also add other variables like butter, cream, garlic, salt, and pepper. Place in a hemisphere and garnish with an organic hyperbolic plane, and your math potatoes are ready for the table. Together with a cranberry cylinder and a nice basket of bread spheres with butter prism, you'll be well on your way to creating a delicious and engaging Thanksgiving meal. Here's a serving tip. When arranging mathed potatoes on your plate, it is important to do it in a way that holds gravy. If you just make a mound, the gravy will fall off. It's best to create some kind of trough or pool. But what shape will maximize the amount of gravy it can hold? Due to the structural properties of mathed potatoes, this can essentially be reduced to a two-dimensional gravy pool problem, where you want the most gravy area given a certain potato perimeter. When I think of this question, I like to think about inflating shapes. Say you inflated a triangle. It would add more area and round out into a circle. And then, if the perimeter can't change, it would pop. In fact, all 2D shapes inflate into circles. And in 3D, it's spheres, which is my bubbles like to be round. And turkeys are spheroid, because that optimizes for maximum stuffing. The limited three-dimensional capacity of mathed potatoes may confuse things a little. But since a mathed potato sphere can't support itself, you're really stuck with extrusions of 2D shapes. So what's better? A deep mathed potato cylinder or a shallow but wider one? Well, think of it like this. If you slice the deep version in half, you'll see it has equivalent gravy-holding capacity to two separate shallow cylinders. And the perimeter of two circles would be more efficient if combined into one bigger circle. So the solution is to create the biggest, roundest, shallowest gravy pool you can. In fact, maybe you should just skip the mathed potatoes and get a bowl. Anyway, I hope this simple recipe helps you have an optimal Thanksgiving experience. Advanced chef-amaticians may wish to try Banach-Tarski potatoes, wherein after you cut a potato in a particular way, you put the pieces back together and get two potatoes. Stay tuned for more delicious and extremely practical Thanksgiving recipes this week.