is it possible to fold a piece of paper in half 8 times??

Question

i have already tried to do this many times with several types and sizes of paper. i've even tried it with toilet paper. try it and answer my curiosity!!please!

Answer 1

Obviously you could sit at your desk folding a piece of paper in half over and over, open close open close etc. thousands of times. But using a standard piece of notebook paper and folding it so each successive fold reduces the size of the sheet by half, I could get to seven folds.
Then the sheet was just a ball.
With toilet paper you can do it with a sheet about 4 ft long, but it still takes some doing.
I can't believe you got me to do this, but you just sparked my curiosity.

Answer 2

Fold Paper 8 Times

Answer 3

Aww cripes people, didn't anyone study math in school?? Okay, so , this is a pretty simple math problem, taken in an "ideal"/"theoretical" way. This will be a really simple and really exaggerated example. Basically most people had it right you can only fold things until they're as thick as they are wide approximately... (Just trying it I couldn't get more than 6 folds on a paper appx 4 inches by 8 inches, by well as thin as a piece of paper, maybe a 1/16 of a millimeter?) So, let's just take the dimensions of a square of paper to make the math simpler: We'll assume the paper is appx 1000 millimeters long by 1000 milimeters wide, by 1/16 of a milimeter high (3 dimensions). Each time you fold a paper in half, one of the dimensions stays the same, another doubles and another is halved. With one fold along the vertical line between the two parallel sides of the paper (we'll use looking at it from above as the vantage point) we get the width halved, the length stay the same and the height doubles (Width=500, length=1000, height = 1/8). Now, we'll try folding it again, this time along the horizontal axis (then vertical, horizontal, vertical horizontal ...). The new dimensions are: Fold 2: width = 500, length = 500, height = 1/4 Fold 3: width = 250, length = 500, height = 1/2 Fold 4: width = 250, length = 250, height = 1 Fold 5: width = 125, length = 250, height = 2 Fold 6: width = 125, length = 125, height = 4 Fold 7: width = 62.5, length = 125, height = 8 Fold 8: width = 62.5, length = 62.5, height = 16 Fold 9: width = 31.25, length = 62.5, height = 32 So basically you're halving one dimension while doubling another with each fold. Eventually you get to a point where you'd have to double one to greater than the half of the other, and it just doesn't work. And that's not taking into account the physics of trying to actually fold a paper. It doesn't fold cleanly, the edge warps with each fold making it increasingly more difficult with each fold. So, if we take a regular piece of paper, we get 8.5in (216mm) x 11in (279mm) x 1/16mm {maybe more; just guesstimating since I can't find an actual measure of the thickness online, if it's thicker, the unfoldable point comes sooner.} Fold 1: Width = 216, length = 139.5, height = 1/8 Fold 2: Width = 108, length = 139.5, height = 1/4 Fold 3: Width = 108, length = 69.75, height = 1/2 Fold 4: Width = 54, length = 69.75, height = 1 Fold 5: Width = 54, length = 34.875, height = 2 Fold 6: Width = 27, length = 34.875, height = 4 Fold 7: Width = 27, length = 17.4375, height = 8 Fold 8: Width = 13.5, length = 17.4375, height = 16 Fold 9: Width = 13.5, length = 8.71875, height = 32 So we see that around fold 7-8 it becomes nigh impossible to fold anymore (maybe fold 6-7 or 5-6 if we're talking heavy weight paper). Even with extremely long thin strips of paper you'll eventually hit a limit of how many halvings and doublings you can do. Heck, let's figure out how a long thin ribbon of paper would fold... Let's say it's 10,000,000 millimeters long, 1000 milimeters wide, and 1/16 of a millimeter thick: Fold 1: Width = 1000, length = 5,000,000, height = 1/8 Fold 2: Width = 1000, length = 2,500,000, height = 1/4 Fold 3: Width = 1000, length = 1,250,000, height = 1/2 Fold 4: Width = 1000, length = 625,000, height = 1 Fold 5: Width = 1000, length = 312,500, height = 2 Fold 6: Width = 1000, length = 156,250, height = 4 Fold 7: Width = 1000, length = 78,125, height = 8 Fold 8: Width = 1000, length = 39,062.50, height = 16 Fold 9: Width = 1000, length = 19,531.25, height = 32 Fold 10: Width = 1000, length = 9,765.625, height = 64 Fold 11: Width = 1000, length = 4882.8125, height = 128 Fold 12: Width = 1000, length = 2441.40625, height = 256 Fold 13: Width = 1000, length = 1220.703125, height = 512 Fold 14: Width = 1000, length = 610.3515625, height = 1024 For this width to length to height ration I'd guess somewhere around fold 10-13 it'll become unfoldable. But for the "regular paper" IE US Letter size, the middle results above say somewhere around 6-8 folds will do it, depending on the thickness of the original paper. Maybe if you had something ultimately thin and ultimately strong (thinner than a hair, stronger than stell and more flexible than rubber; not likely) you could get up to 8, but it's doubtful...

Answer 4

Take a piece of paper and fold it once. The width of the result will be 2 pages. that's easy to fold again. Then the width is 4 pages... you can still fold that... now you've got 8 pages. youcandoit!... you get the point:

fold 0 -- width 1
fold 1 -- width 2
fold 2 -- width 4
fold 3 -- width 8
fold 4 -- width 16
fold 5 -- width 32 (by the way, it's always 2^fold)
fold 6 -- width 64
fold 7 -- width 128 So, if you can fold a book that's 128 pages thick then it's doable
BUT!!! how about the size of the paper.
if after 7 folds you want to end up with something the size of a letter sized sheet of paper (so you have at least a chance of folding it), you need to start with something 128 times as big. Or, if you fold it "one way, and then the other", you need to start with something that's 16 times as wide and 8 times as long:

8.5 x 11 inches means you start with about 12 feet wide by 7 feet long...

So, yes, it can probably be done 8 times... but I am not going to try it ;-)

-jose-

Answer 5

It doesn't matter how big the paper is I know it's only up to 7 times (the 7th being very difficult) a paper can fold in half. But if you do it as free_your_fancy says yeah you can probably do it a million times! Well maybe less than that.

Answer 6

Yes it is but it is in dispute. Someone in holland claims to have folded a peice of paper 21 times, but the folding technique is very special.

Answer 7

I have tried it with a big piece of paper and it still didn't work. I really don't think that it is possible!!

Answer 8

I always learned this as a trick question... there is nothing that says you must keep folding it from its current state. In other words, you do not have to do half, then a half from that and a half from that, and so on. Just fold it in half, open it back up, and fold it in half again, open it back up, fold it in half... and so on...

To me, this is all about thinking "outside of the box." Creative problem solving.

Answer 9

If you fold it 8 times then you would have folded it into 8th's

Answer 10

It depends on how big the paper is. If you have a huge poster-size piece it will work, and if you have a tiny scrap ,it won't.