I just blew the dust off of this post from several years ago...
Quote:
Giant Taco was a close, personal friend of mine.
We took calculus together in school.
He would always tell me, “GH, a taco is the solid formed by bending a circular tortilla around a cylinder and filling it to the border. A natural problem is to find the cylinder that yields the taco of largest volume for a tortilla of a unit radius. For circular cylinders the volume of the taco is a Bessel function of the cylinder's radius, and for cylinders with other familiar cross-sections the volume of the corresponding taco also involves special functions. But in each case, with the aid of a computer algebra system the methods of calculus can be applied to find the taco of maximal volume. However, the general case is a nontrivial problem in the calculus of variations. The existence of a taco of maximal volume for a suitably general class of cylinders can be proved, and numerical experiments are given to show how the shape and volume of this "world's largest taco" can be approximated. This formula will lead me to the taco of my dreams.”
I miss him.
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