Can You Really Only Fold Paper 7 Times? The Myth Busted

For decades, people believed that no piece of paper—no matter how large—could be folded in half more than seven or eight times. It seemed like a fundamental law of physics, right up there with gravity and thermodynamics. Teachers repeated it, science shows demonstrated it, and anyone who tried with a regular sheet quickly hit that wall around fold six or seven.

But here's the thing: it's completely wrong.

The High Schooler Who Broke the 'Unbreakable' Rule

In 2002, Britney Gallivan was a high school student in Pomona, California, when she decided to challenge this supposed impossibility for a math project. While everyone accepted the seven-fold limit as fact, she asked a more interesting question: why can't you fold it more?

Instead of just trying and failing, Gallivan did something remarkable—she derived actual mathematical equations that explained the relationship between paper thickness, length, and the number of possible folds. Her formulas showed that with enough paper length, you could absolutely exceed seven folds. You just needed the right approach.

On January 27, 2002, using a single piece of tissue paper that was 4,000 feet long (that's three-quarters of a mile), she folded it in half twelve times. Not eight. Not nine. Twelve. She became the first person in recorded history to achieve 9, 10, 11, and 12 folds with a single piece of paper.

Why Does Everyone Think Seven is the Limit?

The confusion comes from practical limitations, not physical impossibility. When you fold paper, each fold doubles the thickness. By the seventh fold, you're dealing with 128 layers of paper. By fold twelve? That's 4,096 layers.

With a normal sheet of printer paper (about 8.5 × 11 inches), you run into two problems:

• The stack becomes too thick to crease effectively
• You literally run out of paper surface area to fold
• The required bending force exceeds what human hands can apply

So seven folds isn't a cosmic limit—it's just where regular paper and human strength tap out. Change the parameters (much longer paper, thinner material), and suddenly the impossible becomes achievable.

The Math That Made It Possible

Gallivan's equations are actually elegant. For single-direction folding (folding the same way each time), she determined that the length of paper needed is: L = πt/6(2ⁿ + 4)(2ⁿ - 1), where L is length, t is thickness, and n is the number of folds.

This wasn't just theoretical mumbo-jumbo. She used these formulas to calculate exactly how much tissue paper she needed, then went out and proved it worked. Her record still stands in the Guinness World Records more than 20 years later.

The next time someone confidently tells you that paper can only be folded seven times, you can smugly inform them they're repeating a myth that a teenager debunked with math and a really, really long piece of tissue paper. Sometimes the 'impossible' just needs someone willing to do the calculations.