At some point in my childhood, Pizza Hut introduced the stuffed crust pizza. The idea was simple: stuff the crust with a ring of gooey cheese. It was fine when you had a slice from a large pizza, but on a small pizza, the balance was off—too much crust and not enough topping.
I haven’t thought about stuffed crust pizzas in decades, but they help illustrate an important point in geometry. As a pizza gets bigger, the ratio of crust to surface area gets smaller. So a small pizza has lots of crust, while a large pizza has relatively less crust per unit of topping.
In general, this is expressed as the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its area, which decreases as the radius grows. A small circle has far more edge per unit area than a large one. This is why my small stuffed crust pizza tasted too crusty.
But this post isn’t just about childhood pizza or geometry. It’s about the importance of edges in systems. How much “edge” we have shapes how we interact with the wider environment and how systems function internally. It affects the design of buildings, cities, and infrastructure.
But that’s more than I can stuff into this post—more tomorrow.