31/03/2026 - 14:00 - Euler Building, A.002

Frédéric Meunier

(Ecole nationale des ponts et chaussée) 

Will give a presentation on : 

Envy-free divisions of cakes: recent results and open questions

Abstract: 

The envy-free cake-cutting problem asks for a way to divide a cake (identified with the interval [0,1]) among players with different tastes so that each receives a connected piece and no one envies another’s share. The Stromquist–Woodall theorem from 1980 guarantees the existence of such an envy-free division under mild assumptions. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in this problem from various perspectives — computer science, social choice theory, economics, and topological combinatorics. In this talk, we present several extensions, from these perspectives: the cake may be “poisoned,” there may be multiple cakes with joint preferences, or the cake may be discrete (as in the necklace-splitting problem). We will also discuss several challenging open questions. This talk is based on joint work with Ayumi Igarashi, Francis Su, and Shira Zerbib.

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