How Many Times Can You Fold a Piece of Paper? Junior High School Breaks Notion It’s Impossible to Do Over 8 Folds

A paper can't be folded eight times or more. But that was what many believed until a junior high school proved the public otherwise.

How Many Times Can You Fold a Piece of Paper?

It is a frequent misconception that a sheet of paper can only be folded in half seven times. After a particular number of folds, the paper stack gets thicker than it is wide, depending on the paper's thickness and width. The limit is reached since there is nothing left to fold. Papers are twice as thick after each fold in half. Thus, n folds of a t-thick paper equals a total thickness of 2nt.

Indeed, you can only fold a regular piece of paper seven times. On the other hand, supposing we had an 8.5 x 11. With the help of this equation, we could fold a sheet of paper that was one-quarter the thickness of a normal nine times. You can fold toilet paper even more if you take it and roll it out into a single, long line. But if you are folding in a single direction, you must calculate the width using (1/2)nw, which results in a slightly different equation: n = 0.72 ln (w/t). With this calculation, we can find that we could fold a super-jumbo-sized roll of toilet paper thirteen times if it had a thickness of 0.004 inches and an unrolled length of 170000 inches.

Junior Student Breaks Record

A single sheet of paper was folded 12 times by Britney Gallivan, a junior in high school in Pomona, California, in 2002. She holds the Guinness World Record for folding a piece of paper in half the most times.

"Prior to my endeavor, it was the accepted belief that folding a piece of paper in half more than eight times was impossible and seven folds was the commonly accepted folding limit," Gallivan told Live Science in an email. "I was the first person to ever fold paper in half nine, 10, 11 and 12 times."

Gallivan broke the world record and developed formulas to determine how many times a piece of paper could be folded in half, either once or twice. In her book "How to Fold Paper in Half Twelve Times" (Historical Society of Pomona Valley, 2002), she went into length about these mathematics.

Gallivan was tasked with an extra-credit math assignment to fold anything in half twelve times, which was the impetus behind her accomplishments. She made twelve folds in a small piece of gold foil. The teacher subsequently modified the task to fold a sheet of heavier paper.

She spent several hours trying to fold paper sheets, newspapers, and any other flat material she could find as she started to work on the problem. Most people start their problem-solving process with this method. She found it annoying because she tried folding different papers in half a lot and failed. She came to a point when she started to wonder if the people who had solved the problem before her were right when they said it might not be possible to fold a paper in half more than eight times. However, she refused to believe that there was a limit to folding in half. She knew that she had to complete the task or figure out what was preventing the folding from progressing. She finally surpassed the claim that folding paper more than seven times was impossible by making it up to 12 times.

Gallivan anticipates that someone will eventually surpass her record. She encouraged the others to "shoot for the moon or even the sun, which they will reach after the fiftieth fold!"

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