As it turns out, cutting radially is, in fact, marginally worse than the traditional method. With all your knife strokes converging at a single central point, the thin wedges of onion that you create with your first strokes taper drastically as they get toward the center, resulting in large dice cut from the outer layers and much larger dice from the center. But even the classic method doesn’t produce particularly even dice, with a standard deviation of about 48 percent.

For the next set of simulations, I wondered what would happen if, instead of making radial cuts with the knife pointed directly at the circle’s center, we aimed our knife at an imaginary point somewhere below the surface of the cutting board, producing cuts somewhere between perfectly vertical and completely radial.

This proved to be key. By plotting the standard deviation of the onion pieces against the point below the cutting board surface at which your knife is aimed, Dr. Poulsen produced a chart that revealed the ideal point to be exactly .557 onion radiuses below the surface of the cutting board. Or, if it’s easier: Angle your knife toward a point roughly six-tenths of an onion’s height below the surface of the cutting board. If you want to be even more lax about it, making sure your knife isn’t quite oriented vertically or radially for those initial cuts is enough to make a measurable difference in dice evenness.