If you’ve ever struggled with neatly wrapping gifts of all shapes and sizes, there’s finally a mathematical solution to end your festive woes.
Katie Steckles, mathematician and jazzy Christmas jumper wearer, has made a YouTube video showing everyone the maths behind immaculate gift-wrapping.
She tackles the tricky Toblerone bar that caused so many people to stop gifting people the Swiss chocolate altogether.
Apparently, when faced with a pesky equilateral triangular prism (when are we not?) just make sure the end of the paper reaches the same height as the bar. Follow the “standard method” and it’ll all line up exactly.
“Look at that, it’s beautiful!” enthuses Katie.
She even offers handy, easy-to-remember (sort of) formulas to wrap flat square boxes.
Katie says, “It’s simple, it’s neat and it just makes sense.” Unlike the bizarre hectic electronic soundtrack to her enthusiastic gift-wrapping tutorial.
Suffering festive nightmares over wrapping cylindrical gifts? Not any more, thanks to Katie.
Simply grab your ruler and measure the cylinder’s diameter. Multiply that by pi (3.14) and you’ve got the circumference, which you can measure along the paper to wrap it beautifully.
Easy as, er, pi.
They might look simple, but these devious cuboids have been reducing gift-wrappers to tears for centuries.
Katie’s advice? Simply measure the diagonal length and add that to the height times 1.5 and you won’t waste an inch of wrapping paper.
Move over Kanye West and Jay-Z — this professional wrapper means business.
The Dumbledore of maths even shows you how to have neatly symmetrical end folds (yes, that’s the scientific name) WITHOUT tape.
If you’ve never watched an English lady get really excited about mathematical formulas and neatly wrapped presents before (in a Christmas jumper), we suggest you do.
Right now:
Sadly, Katie doesn’t tackle the complicated process of wrapping a live cat so we’ve provided that for you.
Happy wrapping!
