The problem is notable as the topic of the only well-known mathematics paper ever written by Microsoft founder Bill Gates (as William Gates), entitled "Bounds for Sorting by Prefix Reversal". Published in 1979, it describes an efficient algorithm for pancake sorting. In addition, the most notable paper published by Futurama co-creator David X. Cohen (as David S. Cohen) concerned the burnt pancake problem.

In 2008, a group of undergraduates built a bacterial computer that can solve a simple example of the burnt pancake problem by programming E. coli to flip segments of DNA which are analogous to burnt pancakes. DNA has an orientation (5' and 3') and an order (promoter before coding). Even though the processing power expressed by DNA flips is low, the high number of bacteria in a culture provides a large parallel computing platform. The bacteria report when they have solved the problem by becoming antibiotic resistant.