Folding Paper in Half Twelve Times | Hacker News Reader

Folding Paper in Half Twelve Times

pomonahistorical.org

31 pointsdcminter10 comments

She is only folding lengh-wise and that it's not too difficult with a long enough paper. Also the myth was busted properly in mythbusters season 5, "seven folds":

"They decided to make their open big 170' x 220' piece using 17 rolls of paper joined together with double-sided tape. An experiment this large required that they go to Moffett Field and setup in one of the blimp hangers there.

Using the traditional technique of alternating folds length and width-wise, they were able to get eleven folds."

http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2007/01/episode_72_underwater_car...

looks like they used Britney's method to fold. Also, the favicon on that mythbusters site is very close YC's.

No they didn't, they alternated folds length and width-wise on a rectangular paper while Britney folded a long piece of toilet paper lenght-wise.

Maybe because the budget for MythBusters somewhat exceeds that of a high-school student?

"Not too difficult" my ass. Nobody had ever done it before. Nobody thought that even 9 (much less 12) was possible.

And, she did it several years before the Mythbusters guys, for what it's worth.

Give the girl her due.

What I mean is that it's much easier to physically fold a stripe of toilet paper (one person and a lot of walking) than a huge sheet of paper which needed a team of 20 people to be fold.

And again, it's much more difficult to fold a paper alternating folds length and width-wise than only lenght-wise.

I'd say the math and her grasp of how to use it to solve a problem like this was far more impressive (especially for a then sophomore in HS) than any actual folding that may have occurred.

I worked it out this afternoon, and its not too terribly difficult to get a nice closed form solution (as opposed to a recursive (or iterative one). Its mostly a bit of geometry with some cleverness moving things around to get a nice closed form solution. The only advanced math is a geometric series that comes up at the end, which gives the final fully closed form solution for the length of the paper given a thickness, initial length, and the number of folds. It becomes easy then to solve for an initial length for a number of desired folds.

The fact that she was in high school when she did this though, is impressive. Any teacher with a bit of calculus would have been able to guide her though, once he saw where she was headed.

Of course. All that is trivial compared to the leap of logic required in a High School mind: I could use math to figure this out!

Doesn't it seem possible that Myth Busters find Myths that are possible (if not easy) to bust because it makes better TV?

I'd be surprised if they thought this was really a challenge unless maybe their researchers had never heard of Google.

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