Conventional wisdom defenistrated.

Do you remember when you were first learning some advanced math? I'm thinking in particular about a lesson in progressions, in which the teacher was trying to describe arithmetric and geometric progressions, where the latter was demonstrated by giving each student a piece of paper and asked to fold it as many times as possible. If you remember this, you probably also remember that no matter what you did, you could only fold that paper 6 or 7 times. In fact, in my case the teacher actually came out and said that no matter what you did, you could only manage 8 times. I don't even remember the exact reasoning, because invariably, kids around the classroom quickly tired of the lesson once they (or maybe only I) realized that there wasn't some way I could be smart and manage to actually do it despite how simple it seemed. What if you used thin paper? Wetting the paper wouldn't do it, using bigger paper just didn't really seem to make much of a difference. Anyway... so it turns out that the premise was actually false; yeah, add this to another of the lies your teacher told you.

In 2002, a girl by the name of Britney Gallivan first demonstrated with a piece of gold foil (taking the thinner approach) that she could in fact fold it 12 times! Then she did the same for a piece of paper. This is important, because if previous reports are accurate, she broke previous records 3 more times in the process through folds 9, 10, 11 folds on the way to 12. Yeah, she completely blew the conventional wisdom out of the water.

Even more importantly, she identified the limit through a slowly developed mathematically derived limit formula, which, out of respect for national copyright (aka legal sycophancy, I will link to, instead of posting on my page. Clearly a mathematical formula cannot be copyrighted, you might ask. To which I'd say, "I don't actually know, though it wouldn't surprise me." HOWEVER, since the formula was rendered into a picture on both linked pages, which are most certainly copyrightable and I don't feel like digging around in math programs to recreate said image, I give you Wolfram's explanation of this interesting discovery.