The crumpled paper problem

general-topologygeometrypuzzlerecreational-mathematics

I saw a theorem recently (and have seen similarly phrased problems before), which I found quite surprising. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what its name is (or if it has one). I'll refer to it as the "crumpled paper problem". It goes something like this:

Suppose you were to take two pieces of paper, identical in size and shape, and place one on top of another such that all 4 corners and all 4 edges line up. Now, every point along the top sheet can be "mapped" to its corresponding point on the bottom sheet. If you were to then crumple up the top sheet of paper, and toss it on top of the bottom sheet, there necessarily exists a point on the top sheet that lies precisely above its "mapping point" on the bottom sheet, no matter how it was crumpled or where it was placed.

This result, to me, at least, is very surprising. Intuitively, it seems to me that it must be that there is some way to crumple the paper, or location to toss it, such that no points line up. I can sort've imagined progressively folding the paper (analogous to crumpling), and kind of see how this might be, however, it's still quite challenging.

My question is, how is this proven, does the problem have a name, and to what field of mathematics does this belong? I'm very curious how this can be shown.


I've added those tags which I thought may be relevant. Unfortunately, I have no clue to what precise area of mathematics this belongs to. Please do correct tags as necessary.

Best Answer

It is all about continuity of the crumpling transform. The 1D case is easier to understand.

If you plot the abscissa of the points of the crumpled line vs. the abscissa of the corresponding point in the flat line, you get a continuous function in the range $[0,1]$. As the graph of the function splits the unit square horizontally and is continuous, it must meet the diagonal of the square.

(In other terms, the crumpled abscissa starts larger and ends smaller than the straight abscissa, so it must be equal somewhere.)

enter image description here

In the 2D case, you can plot both the crumpled abscissa and ordinate as a function of the flat abscissa and ordinate, which yield two surfaces in a unit cube. These surfaces meet the oblique planes $x=u$ and $y=v$ along two continuous curves, and these curves meet in at least one point.

This works even if the paper is elastic and can be stretched (i.e. topological matter).

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