Today I learned...

That the reason pizza becomes strengthened and doesnt drop all the cheese and toppings onto your lap when you fold a slice down the middle is due to the mathematician Gauss's Theorema Egregium. Something you always know intuitively but dont know why.

From Wikipedia:
"An application of the Theorema Egregium is seen in a common pizza-eating strategy: A slice of pizza can be seen as a surface with constant Gaussian curvature 0. Gently bending a slice must then roughly maintain this curvature (assuming the bend is roughly a local isometry). If one bends a slice horizontally along a radius, non-zero principal curvatures are created along the bend, dictating that the other principal curvature at these points must be zero. This creates rigidity in the direction perpendicular to the fold, an attribute desirable when eating pizza, as it holds its shape long enough to be consumed without a mess. This same principle is used for strengthening in corrugated materials, most familiarly corrugated fiberboard and corrugated galvanised iron."