Factorizations in the Chicken McNugget monoid

A new study serves up new nuggets of mathematical insight from Chicken McNuggets:

“Distances between factorizations in the Chicken McNugget monoid,” Scott Chapman, Pedro Garcia-Sanchez, Christopher O’Neill, arXiv 1912.04494v1, 2019.

The authors explain:

We use the Chicken McNugget Monoid to demonstrate various factorization properties related to relations and chains of factorizations. We study in depth the catenary and tame degrees of this monoid….

So what is the Chicken McNugget Monoid? We briefly review some background material… Chicken McNuggets were originally sold in packages of size 6, 9, or 20 pieces, and the question of how many Chicken McNuggets can be bought without breaking apart a package became a popular recreational mathematics question. More specifically…

(Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.)