Wolfram Demonstrations Project

12,000+ Open Interactive Demonstrations
Powered by Notebook Technology »

Folding a Strip of Labeled Stamps

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

This Demonstration illustrates the different ways a strip of stamps labeled 1 through can be folded into a stack one stamp wide. In each figure, the colored lines represent the stamps and the dotted lines represent the perforation between adjacent stamps.

Contributed by: Robert Dickau (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Snapshots

Details

Snapshot 1: for 1, 2, and 3 stamps, the number of labeled stamp foldings is equal to the number of permutations of items, or

Snapshots 2, 3: for stamps, the number of labeled stamp foldings is less than , since some permutations lead to impossible foldings; for example, is an impossible folding, since the perforation joining stamps 1 and 2 would intersect with the perforation joining 3 and 4

M. Gardner, "The Combinatorics of Paper Folding," Wheels, Life and Other Mathematical Amusements, New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983 pp. 60–61.

Embed Code

Take advantage of the Wolfram Notebook Emebedder for the recommended user experience.

Related Demonstrations More by Author
Browse all topics
Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send