A high school girl figured out the formula for how long paper must be to be folded in half 11 times!.....

Trust a junior high school student to derive the formula for determining the maximum number of times paper – or other materials for that matter – can be folded in half. Her name is Britney Crystal Gallivan, born in 1985 in California.

While she was in junior high in 2002, Crystal demonstrated that a single piece of toilet measuring 1,200m (4000 feet) in length can be folded in half 11 times. She quelled the earlier perception that the maximum number that any piece of paper could be folded in half was 7.

Miss Gallivan calculated that rather than make the fold in half every other direction, getting the least volume of paper to achieve 11 folds would be to fold it in the same direction with a very long sheet of paper. She provided the empirical proof as well as deriving an equation that yielded the width or length of paper necessary to fold a piece of paper of thickness ‘t’ any number of ‘n’ times. In September 2006, Crystal was a keynote speaker at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, before graduating from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Environmental Science from the College of Natural Resources a year later.