Factoring the Chicken McNugget monoid Scott Chapman, Christopher O'Neill Download PDF Every day, 34 million Chicken McNuggets are sold worldwide. At most McDonalds locations in the United States today

Factoring the Chicken McNugget
monoid
Scott Chapman, Christopher O'Neill
Download PDF
Every day, 34 million Chicken McNuggets are sold
worldwide. At most McDonalds locations in the United
States today, Chicken McNuggets are sold in packs of 4, 6,
10, 20, 40, and 50 pieces. However, shortly after their
introduction in 1979 they were sold in packs of 6, 9, and 20.
The use of these latter three numbers spawned the so-called
Chicken McNugget problem, which asks: "what numbers of
Chicken McNuggets can be ordered using only packs with 6,
9, or 20 pieces?" In this paper, we present an accessible
introduction to this problem, as well as several related
questions whose motivation comes from the theory of non-
unique factorization.
Subjects: Commutative Algebra (math.AC); Combinatorics