Here’s the quickest way to grill burgers, according to math

If you have a hankering for a hamburger, math may have some timesaving cooking tips for you.

Increasing the number of times a burger is flipped from one side to the other reduces its cook time by up to nearly a third, theoretical calculations suggest. But cooks at home probably won’t see much benefit out of more than three to four flips, mathematician Jean-Luc Thiffeault reports June 17 in Physica D.

Thiffeault used math to model how heat moves through an “infinite” slab of meat, which cooks continuously on only the bottom side and cools on the top until the meat is…