The Scientific Showdown Between Kansas and an IHOP Pancake

The Tyranny of the Horizon

For anyone who has driven across its breadth, the state of Kansas presents itself as an exercise in geometric purity. The horizon is a relentlessly straight line, the sky a crushing weight, and the landscape a featureless expanse. It has become a national punchline for monotony, the very definition of “flyover country.” This perception is so deeply ingrained that “as flat as Kansas” feels less like a description and more like a fundamental truth. But what if our eyes, and our assumptions, are deceiving us?

A Question Best Served with Syrup

In the early 2000s, a team of geographers decided to challenge this piece of American folklore with scientific rigor. Mark Fonstad, then at Southwest Texas State University, along with students William Pugatch and Brandon Vogt, sought to quantify the unquantifiable. How, exactly, do you measure “flatness”? To do so, they needed a standard, a universally accepted benchmark for flatness. They found their answer not in a geology textbook, but on a breakfast menu.

“We were sitting around a table, and one of my students said, ‘You know, people talk about Kansas being flat,’ and someone else said, ‘Yeah, flatter than a pancake,’” Fonstad recalled. “And I thought, ‘We have the technology to determine that.’”

The mission was set. They would pit the Sunflower State against a buttermilk pancake. The team drove to a local International House of Pancakes (IHOP), purchased their specimen, and prepared for a topographic showdown of epic proportions.

The Digital and the Delicious

The comparison was a study in scale. For Kansas, the researchers used publicly available topographic data from the U.S. Geological Survey’s National Elevation Dataset. They plotted a precise east-to-west transect across the state, a digital line stretching 562 kilometers from the Missouri to the Colorado border.

For the pancake, the methodology was slightly more intimate. The 130-millimeter-wide breakfast staple was placed under a laser confocal microscope. This high-tech instrument scanned the pancake's surface, mapping its miniature mountains and syrupy valleys with micron-level precision. With data from both a U.S. state and a breakfast food in hand, the team calculated a “flatness ratio” for each, where a perfect, theoretical flatness would score a 1.0.

The Verdict from the Lab

The results, published in the tongue-in-cheek scientific journal Annals of Improbable Research, were definitive. Kansas, with its subtle but extraordinarily consistent slope, registered a flatness value of 0.9997. It was almost perfectly flat.

The IHOP pancake, however, proved to be a rugged terrain of bubbles, craters, and imperfections. Its final flatness score was a mere 0.957. The science was clear: Kansas is, measurably and without question, flatter than a pancake.

The Flatness Fallacy

The humorous study perfectly captured the public imagination, a delightful collision of scientific inquiry and roadside diner Americana. Yet, it held a deeper lesson about perception. The pancake feels flat under our fork, but up close, it’s a chaotic landscape. Kansas feels endlessly flat from a car window, but its topography is a vast, gently sweeping plain, not a featureless void. Our human sense of scale is easily fooled.

But the story has one final, delicious twist. Inspired by the pancake paper, other researchers ran the same calculations for every state in the union. The surprising result? Kansas isn't even in the top five. The flattest state in America is, by a significant margin, Florida. Illinois, North Dakota, Louisiana, Minnesota, and Delaware also out-flat Kansas.

The study that humorously proved a cliché wrong also debunked the very premise it was built on. Kansas may have triumphed over the pancake, but its reign as the king of flatness was an illusion all along—a perception shaped by a long, straight road and the simple tyranny of the horizon.

Sources

• Research: If you think Kansas is the flattest U.S. state, you're ...
• Holy hotcakes! Study finds Kansas flatter than pancake
• Kansas Is Flatter Than a Pancake
• October 2003 - Fracas over Kansas pancake flap
• Rediscover Kansas on National Pancake Day
• Inspired by pancakes: Further findings on the flatness of ...
• When Researchers Used IHOP to Determine if Kansas Is ...