For years, a popular belief circulated that a piece of paper couldn’t be folded more than seven times. It seemed logical—each fold doubles the thickness, making it harder and harder to fold further. But is this really true?
Let’s break it down. When you fold a piece of paper, its thickness increases exponentially. For example, if you start with a standard A4 sheet, about 0.1 mm thick, after one fold, it becomes 0.2 mm thick. By the seventh fold, it would be 12.8 mm thick—still manageable, but not easy to fold by hand. This is why the myth became widely accepted.
However, in 2002, a high school student named Britney Gallivan shattered this myth. She successfully folded a piece of paper 12 times! To achieve this, she had to use a much longer sheet of paper and developed a mathematical formula to calculate the minimum length needed to fold paper any given number of times. Her experiment proved that it’s not the number of folds that’s the limit, but rather the length and thickness of the paper.
Here’s the catch: to fold a typical sheet of A4 paper more than 7 times, you would need a sheet that’s several kilometers long! This is because each additional fold requires exponentially more length to compensate for the increasing thickness.
Gallivan’s work demonstrates how curiosity and persistence can challenge widely held beliefs. It’s a great reminder that even seemingly trivial things, like folding paper, can lead to fascinating discoveries.
So, next time you hear someone say you can’t fold a piece of paper more than seven times, you can confidently tell them the story of how this myth was busted—and maybe even try it yourself, if you can find a long enough piece of paper!