Britney Gallivan Britney Gallivan Britney Crystal Gallivan (born 1985) of Pomona, California, is best known for determining the maximum number of times that paper or other materials can be folded in half. In January 2002, while a junior in high school, Gallivan demonstrated that a single piece of toilet paper 4000 ft (1200 m) in length can be folded in half twelve times. This was contrary to the popular conception that the maximum number of times any piece of paper could be folded in half was seven. She calculated that, instead of folding in half every other direction, the least volume of
Mathematics of paper folding produced using a non-folded crease in the paper, as is easily done with wet paper or a fingernail. Assigning a crease pattern mountain and valley folds in order to produce a flat model has been proven by Marshall Bern and Barry Hayes to be NP-complete. Further references and technical results are discussed in Part II of "Geometric Folding Algorithms". Some classical construction problems of geometry — namely trisecting an arbitrary angle or doubling the cube — are proven to be unsolvable using compass and straightedge, but can be solved using only a few paper folds. Paper fold strips can be