Everybody has met someone who randomly puts forth a claim like “a piece of paper can only be folded on itself seven times.” Because YouTube wasn’t a thing when I was young, as soon as I heard this claim, I ripped out a piece of paper and started folding it. I folded in half once, then twice, and so on until I got to 7 folds. After the seventh fold, my classmates and I could not fold the paper an eighth time, no matter what we tried. We stepped on it, put it under a table with six of us on it, ran it over with a bike, and smashed it with the classroom door to no avail. All the while, the friend who sent us on this wild rampage just sat back and grinned, looking distantly to the future, imagining the Nobel prize he would win.
I believed in this fact until my sophomore year in university, when my mathematics professor mentioned the bedsheet problem and told us about Britney Galivan, who in 2002 had folded a massive sheet of paper 12 times, cementing her name in the Guinness Book of World Records. That day, not only had I learned that my friend’s bet was false, but that there was another Britney other than Britney Spears. Again, this was before the internet age, and Britney Spears was the only Britney I had heard about.
Instead of approaching the problem by folding the paper in two, Britney Gallivan devised another tactic. This is the principle…