Of Course You Can Use Math to Perfectly Fold a Notebook Page Into a Bookmark | Science - Popular Mechanics

Caroline Delbert, writer, book editor, researcher, and avid reader summarizes, Hey, you never know when it'll come in handy.

Photo: Caroline Delbert

You find a lot of great stuff when browsing through arXiv, the repository of scientific research run by Cornell University, including very elaborate solutions to problems you didn't necessarily know existed. But now that we think about it, we would like to know the ideal way to fold a notebook page in order to "bookmark" it, actually.

Enter Chenguang Zhang, a postdoc in MIT’s math department and Earth Resources Laboratory, who crunched the numbers to find the perfect folding method. In a new paper posted to arXiv, Zhang says he was inspired by a square notebook with a top spiral that he’s been using.

Folding as a way to bookmark pages, Zhang says, conjures the idea of origami. In recent decades, as the study of how materials can fold and deform becomes more important in micromaterials, spaceflight, and everything in between, researchers are studying origami and kirigami principles under the scrutiny of science. As Zhang explains, “Since the last century, it has seen significant developments that, interestingly, were far beyond its originally recreational and artistic nature.”...

There you have it. There really is math for everything.

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Source: Popular Mechanics