When my colleague Samantha Cavanagh and I mentioned the subject of eccentricity in our Earth Science class recently, our students immediately made a connection to The Eccentric Bagel on West Neck Road.
This inspired a lab designed to calculate the eccentricity of a bagel (typically, eccentricity is used in Earth Science to calculate the “ovalness” of an orbit).
Owner Darryn Weinstein crafted an order of varying oval bagels. Students used the length of the major axis (similar to measuring a diameter) and the distance between the foci (represented by the bagel hole) to see how just eccentric their bagels were.
