A lot of strange things happen in this world, and it is almost impossible to immediately believe in the reality of some stories. It is stories like these that are true journalistic success. After all, an ordinary quiet life can never become the topic of a news story. We offer our reader a small selection of such short and amazing facts.
Chances are you won't be able to resist checking out some of the facts on our list. Here are 60 facts that are incredibly hard to believe:
1. From a lightning strike, you can get a fractal tattoo (the so-called Lichtenberg figure).
2. Approximately one child in five thousand is born without an anus. This phenomenon is called an imperforated anus, which is restored with a surgical intervention.
3. When a Google employee dies, their spouse receives half salary for 10 years, and their children receive a $1,000 per month benefit until age 19.
4. Indian housewives own 11% of the world's gold reserves. This is more than the reserves of the US, the IMF, Switzerland and Germany combined.
5. Lobsters do not age and die. In fact, as far as scientists know, they die only from external factors.
6. The rings of Saturn are only 9 to 90 meters thick.
7. If you eat polar bear liver, you will die. Humans can't handle that much vitamin A.
8. Honey does not spoil. It is quite possible to eat honey that is over 5,000 years old.
9. In 1982, a man broke into Buckingham Palace and spent half an hour there, eating found cheddar cheese and walking around the palace chambers. The alarm systems never worked because they were faulty. He examined the royal portraits and rested on the throne for some time. Then the attacker drank half a bottle of wine, got tired and left the palace.
10. If we remove all the empty space in the atoms that make up every inhabitant of our planet, then the entire population of the Earth could fit in one apple.
11. The human eye is so sensitive that if the Earth were flat, we would see a candle in the dark at a distance of 32 kilometers. The most distant object visible to the naked eye is the Andromeda galaxy, which is located at a distance of 2.6 million light-years from Earth.
12. If you remove all the empty space in the atoms of all people, then the entire human race can fit in a sugar cube. The atoms that make us up are 99.9999999999999% of empty space. In theory, if you remove all the empty space, then you can put humanity in the volume of a sugar cube.
13. On September 11, after the collapse of both towers of the World Trade Center in New York, several fighter jets were scrambled into the air without combat equipment in order to prevent hijacked planes from attacking other targets. At the same time, the pilots were ordered to go ram the hijacked aircraft and thus destroy their own cars, using the ejection system at the last moment.
14. A deck of cards is never shuffled in the same order. If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, and every planet had a trillion people, and everyone had a trillion decks of cards, and shuffled the cards a thousand times a second, and have done so since the Big Bang, then perhaps only now the order would be repeated.
15. Every 200th person living today is a descendant of Genghis Khan. The Great Khan had a numerous harem and a huge offspring. Scientists come to the conclusion that the great khan or one of his direct descendants could be the great ancestor of 16 million Asians.
16. Every tenth photograph taken in the history of mankind was taken in the last 12 months. According to some estimates, people took about 880 billion photos in 2014, and these are mostly selfies.
17. To become a driver of the famous London black cab, you need to know more than 25 thousand roads and the location of 50 thousand places of interest, as well as pass a special test called "theKnowledge". To pass the exam, candidates usually need twelve attempts and about 34 months of preparation.
18. Your blood vessels are long enough to circle the Earth two and a half times. The total length of the blood vessels of the human body is about 100 thousand kilometers. This is more than twice the length of the Earth's equator.
19. There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches of our planet. There are about 10 sextillion stars in the universe (one followed by 22 zeros). There are approximately 5 sextillion grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.
20. At the end of the Vietnam War, the crew of the USS Midway pushed $10 million worth of helicopters overboard so that the Cessna plane with evacuees could land on its deck.
21. Antarctica is the world's largest desert. Although Antarctica does not look like a desert, it receives less than 5 cm of precipitation per year. The Sahara Desert receives up to 10 cm of precipitation per year.
22. If you fold a piece of paper 42 times, it will be thick enough to reach the moon. And again theoretical calculations. Every time you fold a sheet of paper, its thickness doubles. If we assume that the thickness of a sheet of office paper is 0.1 millimeters, then at the first addition it will be 0.2 millimeters, at the second 0.4, at the third 0.8 and so on. That is, if a sheet of paper could be folded 42 times, the thickness of the resulting structure would be almost 440 thousand kilometers. Whereas the distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,400 kilometers.
23. There are more nerve connections in your brain than there are stars in the galaxy. The human brain contains, on average, about 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to each other by hundreds of trillions of synapses. According to current estimates, there are between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
24. A line of all possible combinations of the Rubik's Cube can reach the Sun more than 17 million times. The number of possible different states of the Rubik's Cube is more than 43 quintillion combinations. If you had a separate cube for each possible permutation of the Rubik's Cube, and you put them in a continuous chain, then it would stretch for 262 light years.
25. Paul Kern was a Hungarian soldier who was wounded in 1915 during one of the battles of the First World War. A bullet from a Russian soldier hit him in the head and destroyed part of the frontal lobe of the brain. However, she did not kill Kern, but instead rendered him unable to sleep. He continued to live life to the fullest, with no need for sleep at all.
26. At the time of its release, the iPhone had the same processing power that NASA had in 1969, when the historic manned flight to the moon was carried out.
27. There is a whole jungle in your navel. Scientists from the University of North Carolina have found that this delicate part of the human body can concentrate up to 1.4 thousand different types of microbes, 662 of them are unique and, moreover, science has never been known before. The scientists compared the navel to a rainforest of microbial fauna.
28. The world population of ants has the same weight as the world population of humans. Ants outnumber humans by a million to one, making up for their small size.
29. The weight of the Internet is equal to one strawberry. It all started with the fact that one of the mathematicians calculated that the electronic reader is gaining weight every time we add a new book to the library. According to his version, this happens due to the energy received by electrons at the time when they store information. Using the same mathematical principle, the scientific YouTube channel calculated the approximate mass of all traffic generated by the Internet. Surprisingly, it weighs only 50 grams - this is approximately the weight of one large strawberry.
30. In the African country of Lesotho, there is a runway where airplanes accelerate and then break off a cliff and fall until they gain enough speed to fly.
50% of human DNA is similar to a banana. By mapping the human genetic map, scientists found that 50% of our genes are similar to those of a banana, and 40% to the genes of a worm.
31. The surface of Mars has been explored better than the ocean floor. About 72% of the Earth's surface is covered with water. So far, we have explored only 5% of this vast area.
Every day a video is uploaded to YouTube that is equivalent to 16 years. More than 100 hours of video are uploaded to the most popular Internet resource YouTube every minute, that is, more than four full days of video are uploaded per minute.
32. In 1995, someone dropped an old 600-year-old plaster figure of Buddha. As a result, it was found that a layer of gypsum hid a solid gold figurine underneath.
33. If Everest were placed at the bottom of the deepest place in the ocean, its top would be two kilometers under water. The depth of the Mariana Trench, one of the least explored places on the planet, is about 11 thousand kilometers. The highest peak in the world rises above sea level to a height of 8848 meters.
34. New Zealand trucker fell on a high pressure air valve. He pierced the left buttock and pumped the poor fellow with air, doubling his volume and almost killing him. The driver survived, but it took him three days to get rid of excess air by emitting gases.
35. Alpacas can die of loneliness. When purchasing animals, you must immediately buy a pair of alpacas.
36. After hitting his head on the bottom of a swimming pool, a certain Derek Amato from Colorado woke up and discovered an extraordinary talent. He developed the so-called savant syndrome, a rare brain condition in which the so-called "island of genius" begins to operate. He later became an outstanding pianist without taking a single music lesson.
37. A modern calculator is more powerful than the computers that landed on the moon in 1969. And the amount of RAM IPhone5 is 15.5 thousand times higher than the same indicator of the computers of the Voyager spacecraft.
38. Only one chord is used throughout the song Coconut. It is the only song without chord changes to hit the Billboard Hot 100. It peaked at number 8 in 1972.
39. The longest sniper shot in history was fired from a distance of 2475 meters by British cavalry corporal Craig Harrison in 2009. His bullet flew to the target for more than 6 seconds.
40. There is a computer application containing information about all the inhabitants of Iceland since the eighteenth century. Since the population of the country is very small, only about 320,000, this program can be used to prevent sexual relations between relatives. To do this, you just need to enter both names of lovers into it.
41. Mantis shrimp can move their claws so fast that water boils around them and a flash of light is created.
42. The number of possible combinations of moves in chess exceeds the number of atoms in the entire universe (for those interested, read the articles on the Shannon number).
43. All the hair on a human head is capable of supporting a weight of 12 tons.
44. Dead people get goosebumps.
45. There are more confirmed deaths from drowning in molasses than from coyote attacks. (During the 1919 Boston Molasses Disaster, 21 people died. At the same time, only 2 fatal coyote attacks on humans were recorded.)
46. If you could fold a sheet of paper in half 42 times, it would reach the moon (with an average sheet thickness of approximately 0.01 cm).
47. Neil Armstrong passed through US Customs in Honolulu, Hawaii on his way back from the moon.
48. Pluto lost the status of a planet because it never made a complete revolution around the Sun in a certain orbit belonging only to it.
49. There are dead wasps in figs. This is due to the fact that the wasps climb inside, lay eggs and die. Thus, they aid in pollination and are digested over time by the fig enzymes.
50. Initially, McDonald's is a real estate company. We are engaged in real estate transactions. The only reason we sell hamburgers is they are the best way to generate income that allows our tenants to pay rent, said company founder Harry Sonnenborn.
51. Elvis was a natural blonde.
52. Happy Birthday to You is copyrighted.
53. On average, each chocolate bar contains 8 insect particles.
54. Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia.
55. A supersonic jet once broke the sound barrier over a field of turkeys. The supersonic boom caused a heart attack in the turkeys, killing them all.
56. If you had a long enough tube, you would only be able to suck up water up to about 10 meters. After that, the water spontaneously boils.
57. Plankton produces half of the oxygen on Earth. Phytoplankton, like trees and plants, use photosynthesis to turn light into energy. As a result, the oxygen we breathe is produced.
58. Gary Newman (last name means New Man) is older than Gary Oldman (translated as Old Man or Old Man)
59. If you do not have a child, then you will become the first in the family tree, going right up to the very beginning of human history, a childless person.
60. Portugal decriminalized all drugs eleven years ago and since then the number of drug addicts has halved. In the country, drug addiction is not considered a crime, but a public health problem.
People are half bananas, and a piece of paper can reach the moon. These facts seem implausible, although in fact they are absolutely true.
1. The human eye is so sensitive that if the Earth were flat, we would see a candle in the dark at a distance of 32 kilometers. The most distant object visible to the naked eye is the Andromeda galaxy, which is located at a distance of 2.6 million light years from Earth.
2. If you remove all the empty space in the atoms of all people, then the entire human race can fit in a sugar cube. The atoms that make us up are 99.9999999999999% of empty space. In theory, if you remove all the empty space, then you can put humanity in the volume of a sugar cube.
3. A deck of cards is never shuffled in the same order. If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, and every planet had a trillion people, and everyone had a trillion decks of cards, and shuffled the cards a thousand times a second, and have done so since the Big Bang, then perhaps only now the order would be repeated.
4. Every 200th person living today is a descendant of Genghis Khan. The Great Khan had a numerous harem and a huge offspring. Scientists come to the conclusion that the great khan or one of his direct descendants could be the great ancestor of 16 million Asians.
5. Every tenth photograph taken in the history of mankind was taken in the last 12 months. According to some estimates, people took about 880 billion photos in 2014, and these are mostly selfies.
6. Your blood vessels are long enough to circle the Earth two and a half times. The total length of the blood vessels of the human body is about 100 thousand kilometers. This is more than twice the length of the Earth's equator.
7. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of our planet. There are about 10 sextillion stars in the universe (one followed by 22 zeros). There are approximately 5 sextillion grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.
8. Antarctica is the world's largest desert. Although Antarctica does not look like a desert, it receives less than 5 cm of precipitation per year. The Sahara Desert receives up to 10 cm of precipitation per year.
9. If you fold a piece of paper 42 times, it will be thick enough to reach the moon. And again theoretical calculations. Every time you fold a sheet of paper, its thickness doubles. If we assume that the thickness of a sheet of office paper is 0.1 millimeters, then at the first addition it will be 0.2 millimeters, at the second - 0.4, at the third - 0.8 and so on. That is, if a sheet of paper could be folded 42 times, the thickness of the resulting structure would be almost 440 thousand kilometers. Whereas the distance from the Earth to the Moon is 384,400 kilometers.
10. There are more nerve connections in your brain than there are stars in the galaxy. The human brain, on average, contains about 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to each other by hundreds of trillions of synapses. According to current estimates, there are between 200 and 400 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.
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11. A line of all possible combinations of the Rubik's Cube can reach the Sun more than 17 million times. The number of possible different states of the Rubik's Cube is over 43 quintillion combinations. If you had a separate cube for each possible permutation of the Rubik's Cube, and you put them in a continuous chain, then it would stretch for 262 light years.
12. There is a whole "jungle" in your navel. Scientists from the University of North Carolina have found that this delicate part of the human body can concentrate up to 1.4 thousand different types of microbes, 662 of them are unique and, moreover, science has never been known before. Scientists compared the navel to a "rainforest" of microbial fauna.
13. The world population of ants has the same weight as the world population of humans. Ants outnumber humans by a million to one, making up for their small size.
14. The weight of the Internet is equal to one strawberry. It all started with the fact that one of the mathematicians calculated that the electronic reader "gains weight" every time we add a new book to the library. According to his version, this happens due to the energy received by electrons at the time when they store information. Using the same mathematical principle, the scientific YouTube channel calculated the approximate mass of all traffic generated by the Internet. Surprisingly, it weighs only 50 grams - this is approximately the weight of one large strawberry.
15. 50% of human DNA is similar to a banana. By mapping the human genetic map, scientists found that 50% of our genes are similar to banana genes, and 40% to worm genes.
16. The surface of Mars is better explored than the ocean floor. About 72% of the Earth's surface is covered with water. So far, we have explored only 5% of this vast area.
17. Every day, a video equivalent to 16 years is uploaded to YouTube. More than 100 hours of video are uploaded to the most popular Internet resource YouTube every minute, that is, more than four full days of video are uploaded per minute.
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18. If Everest were placed at the bottom of the deepest place in the ocean, its top would be two kilometers under water. The depth of the Mariana Trench, one of the least explored places on the planet, is about 11 thousand kilometers. The highest peak in the world rises above sea level to a height of 8848 meters.
19. Plankton produces half of the oxygen on Earth. Phytoplankton, like trees and plants, use photosynthesis to turn light into energy. As a result, the oxygen we breathe is produced.
20. A modern calculator is more powerful than the computers that landed on the moon in 1969. And the amount of RAM IPhone5 is 15.5 thousand times higher than the same indicator of the computers of the Voyager spacecraft.
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Regardless of whether you are young or already old, in this world there were, are and will be things and phenomena that you did not even suspect existed. Well, it's impossible to know everything.
Every 2 minutes we take more pictures than all of humanity took in the 19th century.At the moment, 1998 is as far away from us as 2030.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.
New York is actually south of Rome in Italy.
Mammoths died out only 1000 years after the Egyptian pyramids were built.
When the fax machine was invented, there was still serfdom in Russia.
The Simpsons animated series has been running for so long that people who graduated from college this year were born when the show has already been on the screens for several years.
Carrots were originally purple.
At the time the first Star Wars movie came out, people in France were still being executed by guillotine.
It's hard to believe, but there are more libraries in the US than McDonald's restaurants.
Human DNA is 50% identical to banana DNA.
In Welsh folklore, fairies traveled on corgi dogs.
If a sheet of paper is folded 42 times, then the thickness of the convolution will be equal to the distance from the Earth to the Moon
Hundreds of trees grow every year just because squirrels forget where they bury their acorns and cones.
Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia.
The name Jessica was coined by Shakespeare for the play The Merchant of Venice.
Since Pluto was discovered, and until the moment when it was deprived of the status of a planet, it has not completed a single revolution around the Sun.
The surface area of Pluto is smaller than the area of Russia.
It rains diamonds on Saturn and Jupiter.
There are more atoms in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in all the oceans of the earth.
Strawberries, in fact, are not a berry at all, but a banana is.
Other berries are avocado and watermelon.
Alaska is simultaneously the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost state of the United States. The Aleutian Islands, belonging to Alaska, cross the 180th meridian, so they are the easternmost.
Dolphins give each other names.
You are twice as likely to die from a vending machine than you are to be eaten by a shark.
A pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes.
The probability that a glass of water you drink contains a water molecule that has been in the body of a dinosaur is almost 100%.
There are more artificial flamingos in the world than live ones.
Cleopatra lived closer to the time of the invention of the iPhone than to the time of the construction of the Egyptian pyramids.
A day on Venus lasts longer than a year.
When you remember an event, you are remembering the last time you remembered it, not the event itself.
Finland and North Korea are separated by just one country.
An octopus has 3 hearts.
Wayne Alwine and Russi Taylor, who voiced Mickey and Minnie Mouse respectively, were actually married.
No one knows why the letters in the alphabet are in that order.
There are more ways to shuffle cards than there are atoms on Earth.
Goats have an accent.
We can't breathe and swallow at the same time
Chocolate milk was invented in Ireland.
Less time has passed between the existence of Tyrannosaurus and man than between the existence of the same Tyrannosaurus and Stegosaurus.
And finally, your whole life has brought you to this very moment.
People are half bananas, and a piece of paper can reach the moon. These facts seem implausible, although in fact they are absolutely true.
1. The human eye is so sensitive that if the Earth were flat, we would see a candle in the dark at a distance of 32 kilometers.
The most distant object visible to the naked eye is the Andromeda galaxy, which is located at a distance of 2.6 million light-years from Earth.
2. If you remove all the empty space in the atoms of all people, then the entire human race can fit in a sugar cube
Humanity or the atoms that make us up is 99.9999999999999% of empty space. In theory, if you remove all the empty space, then you can put humanity in the volume of a sugar cube.
3. Alaska is the most northern, western and eastern state of the USA
Alaska is considered the easternmost and westernmost state. The Aleutian Islands of Alaska cross the western and eastern hemispheres.
4. A deck of cards is never shuffled in the same order
If every star in our galaxy had a trillion planets, and every planet had a trillion people, and everyone had a trillion decks of cards, and shuffled the cards 1,000 times a second, and have done so since the Big Bang, then it's only possible now. the order would be repeated.
5. Every 200 people living today are a descendant of Genghis Khan
Ruler of one of the largest empires in history, Genghis Khan went to great lengths to pass on his genes.
6. If a nickel were the size of the Earth, an atom would be the size of a nickel
If you were to receive an atom of gold every second that has passed since the Big Bang, your gold jewelry would weigh no more than 0.14 milligrams.
7. 1 in 10 photographs taken in human history was taken in the last 12 months
According to some estimates, people took about 880 billion photos in 2014, and these are mostly selfies.
8. Your blood vessels are long enough to circle the Earth 12 times.
There are 160,000 km of blood vessels in the human body. This is enough to circumnavigate the Earth with a diameter of 12,742 km.
9. There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of our planet.
There are about 10 sextillion stars in the universe (1 with 22 zeros). There are approximately 5 sextillion grains of sand on all the beaches of the Earth.
10. Antarctica is the world's largest desert
Although Antarctica does not look like a desert, it receives less than 5 cm of precipitation per year. The Sahara Desert receives up to 10 cm of precipitation per year.
11. A line of all possible combinations of the Rubik's Cube can reach the Sun more than 17 million times.
If you had a separate cube for each possible permutation of the Rubik's Cube, and you put them in a continuous chain, then it would stretch for 262 light years. For comparison, the Sun is 8 light-minutes away, and the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, is 4 light-years away from Earth.
12. If you fold a piece of paper 42 times, it will be thick enough to reach the moon.
Every time you fold a sheet of paper, its thickness grows exponentially. By the time you have folded the piece of paper 20 times, it will be 9.6 km tall, taller than Everest. This means that 42 additions will be thick enough to reach 239,000 km from the Moon.
13. There are more nerve connections in your brain than there are stars in the galaxy.
The number of synapses in the average human brain is in the trillions, namely 0.15 quadrillion. There are about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way.
14. If there are 57 people in a room, then there is a 99 percent chance that at least two will have the same birthday.
Add 13 more people and the odds go up to 99.99 percent.
15. There is a whole "jungle" in your navel
In the tiny cavity of your belly is a jungle-sized ecosystem. After examining 60 navels, scientists found 2,368 species of bacteria there, 1,458 of which are not known to science.
16. The world population of ants has the same weight as the world population of humans.
Ants outnumber humans by a ratio of 1 million to one, which makes up for their small size.
17. The weight of the Internet is equal to one strawberry
Much of the digital information in motion is made up of electrons, just like everything else. It is estimated that the world's Internet traffic weighs about 50 grams.
18. A calculator more powerful than the computers that landed on the moon in 1969
And the memory capacity of the iPhone5 is 240,000 times greater than that of the Voyager spacecraft.
19. 50 percent of human DNA is similar to a banana
We have 95 percent DNA similarity to chimpanzees, and 50 percent similar DNA to bananas. We all come from the same family tree, the tree of life, and therefore we have similar characteristics.
20. The surface of Mars is better explored than the ocean floor.
About 72 percent of the Earth's surface is covered with water. So far, we have explored only 5 percent of this vast area.
21. Human fingers are so sensitive that if they were the size of the Earth, they would feel the difference between houses and cars.
Human fingers are able to feel incredibly small imperfections on a nanoscale on an apparently completely smooth surface.
22. Plankton produce 50 percent of the Earth's oxygen
Phytoplankton, just like trees and plants, use photosynthesis to turn light into energy.
23. Russia has more landmass than Pluto
Pluto is one of the largest dwarf planets. The surface area of Pluto is 1.67 x 10^7 square meters. km. The size of Pluto is approximately 3.3 percent of the Earth's surface.
24. The equivalent of 16 years of video is uploaded to YouTube every day.
Every month, 6 billion hours of recorded human beings are uploaded.
25. The deepest place in the ocean is so deep that if Everest were placed on the bottom, the top would still be submerged 1.6 km under water.
The Mariana Trench, which is about 11 km deep, is located in the Pacific Ocean and is home to the most mysterious marine life.
We have never been able to find the source of this widespread belief: no sheet of paper can be folded twice more than seven (according to some sources - eight) times. Meanwhile, the current record for folding is 12 times. And what is more surprising, it belongs to the girl who mathematically substantiated this “mystery of the paper sheet”.
Of course, we are talking about real paper, having a finite, not zero, thickness. If you fold it carefully and to the end, excluding breaks (this is very important), then the “refusal” to fold in half is detected, usually after the sixth time. Less often - the seventh. Try doing this with a piece of notebook paper.
And, oddly enough, the limitation depends little on the size of the sheet and its thickness. That is, just take a larger thin sheet, and fold it in half, let's say 30 or at least 15 times - it doesn’t work, no matter how you fight.
In popular collections, such as "Do you know what ..." or "Amazing is nearby", this fact - that it is impossible to fold paper more than 8 times - can still be found in many places, on the Web and beyond. But is it a fact?
Let's reason. Each addition doubles the thickness of the bale. If the thickness of the paper is taken equal to 0.1 millimeters (we do not consider the size of the sheet now), then folding it in half “only” 51 times will give the thickness of the folded pack of 226 million kilometers. Which is an obvious absurdity.
World record holder Britney Gallivan and a paper tape folded in half (in one direction) 11 times (photo from mathworld.wolfram.com).
It seems that here we begin to understand where the well-known limitation of 7 or 8 times comes from (once again, our paper is real, it does not stretch to infinity and does not tear, but it will tear - this is no longer folding). But still…
In 2001, an American schoolgirl decided to come to grips with the problem of double folding, and this resulted in a whole scientific study, and even a world record.
Actually, it all started with a challenge thrown by the teacher to the students: “But try to fold at least something in half 12 times!”. Like, make sure that this is from the category of completely impossible.
Britney Gallivan (note that she is now a student) initially reacted like Lewis Carroll's Alice: "It's useless to try." But after all, the Queen said to Alice: "I dare say that you did not have much practice."
So Gallivan took up the practice. Having suffered quite a bit with various objects, she folded a sheet of gold foil in half 12 times, which put her teacher to shame.
An example of folding a sheet in half four times. The dotted line is the previous position of the triple addition. The letters show that the points on the surface of the sheet are displaced (that is, the sheets slide relative to each other), and as a result, take a different position than it might seem at a cursory glance (illustration from the site pomonahistorical.org).
This girl did not calm down. In December 2001, she created a mathematical theory (well, or mathematical justification) for the process of double folding, and in January 2002 she did a 12-fold folding in half with paper, using a series of rules and several folding directions (for lovers of mathematics, a little more -).
Britney noticed that mathematicians had previously addressed this problem, but no one had yet provided a correct and proven solution to the problem.
Gallivan was the first person to correctly understand and justify the reason for the limits on addition. She studied the effects that accumulate when a real sheet is folded and the “loss” of paper (and any other material) on the fold itself. She obtained equations for the folding limit, for any given leaf parameters. Here they are.
The first equation refers to folding the strip in only one direction. L is the minimum possible length of the material, t is the thickness of the sheet, and n is the number of doubled folds. Of course, L and t must be expressed in the same units.
Gallivan and her record (photo from pomonahistorical.org).
In the second equation, we are talking about folding in different, variable directions (but still - twice each time). Here W is the width of the square sheet. The exact equation for folding in "alternative" directions is more complicated, but here is a form that gives a very realistic result.
