Meet Miss Foldy McFolderson
Here at Vertigo we have approximately 845 employees, plus or minus 835, that attended UC Berkeley. I've heard it's a good school. And now it has another claim to fame: Britney Gallivan, who is currently a Junior at the University of California - Berkeley, managed to fold a piece of paper in half tweve times:
This well known challenge was to fold paper in half more than seven or eight times, using paper of any size or shape.
In April of 2005 Britney's success was mentioned on the prime time CBS television show Numb3rs.
The task was commonly known to be impossible. Over the years the problem has been discussed by many people, including mathematicians and has been demonstrated to be impossible on TV.
For extra credit in a math class Britney was given the challenge to fold anything in half 12 times. After extensive experimentation, she folded a sheet of gold foil 12 times, breaking the record. This was using alternate directions of folding. But, the challenge was then redefined to fold a piece of paper. She studied the problem and was the first person to realize the basic cause for the limits. She then derived the folding limit equation for any given dimension. Limiting equations were derived for the case of folding in alternate directions and for the case of folding in a single direction using a long strip of paper. The merits of both folding approaches are discussed, but for high numbers of folds, single direction folding requires less paper.
Britney's single-direction folding technique looks something like this:
There's a bunch of crazy math backing this up, too.
Our secret UC Berkeley spies are currently on the job, investigating whether or not the folding guru still attends UC Berkeley or not!