What Crumpled Sheets Can Teach Us About Computation and Earthquakes

Take a scrap piece of paper from your desk and crumple it into a ball. It may not be immediately apparent, but this everyday object exhibits rich mechanical properties that can provide insights about efficient memory storage, novel computation strategies, and even the dynamics of earthquakes. Combining experiments, simulations and theory, I will demonstrate how creases in crumpled thin sheets act as mechanical bits of memory that compute collectively. Then, I will reveal how under external loading these bits give rise to extremely slow responses and avalanches, whose statistics resemble the aftershocks that follow a large earthquake.