A Brief Overview of Wrapping Gifts, for those of you about to rage-quit Christmas

If you’re a proactive person, this post will be one of those fancy desserts that blends well with the meal that came before it.  If you’re like most people I know, this post will be the burnt English muffin breakfast you almost forgot about on your way out the door in the morning.  Sorry about that.

The concept of wrapping gifts to hide contents and decorate packaging dates all the way back to ancient China when government officials were presented with gifts of money wrapped in paper envelopes.  The Japanese in the Edo period (1600s to 1800s), wrapped gifts in decorative silk cloths in a method called furoshiki. 

Spinning the globe a bit, we come to Victorian era England, where gift giving was a popular pastime, second only to displaying an illusion of wealth.  Over time, the upper classes developed a trend of concealing gifts in wallpaper.  If you’ve ever used wallpaper for anything, you know that it can be a pain to fold, and I can only imagine that the smaller the gift, the more un-Victorian profanity involved.   After paper manufacturers realized that this trend was not going away, they started selling colored tissue paper that was both decorative and easy to manipulate.

Enter the American company, Hallmark.  Almost one hundred years ago, the Hall brothers accidentally invented what is now wrapping paper when they ran out of that fancy tissue paper and improvised by selling pretty print French paper envelope liners.  Those went over so well with Hallmark’s customer base that they began printing their own.

But gift wrapping isn’t just a social nicety we begrudgingly observe a few times a year.  It’s also science!  The “gift wrapping” algorithm is something mathematicians use to find the convex hull of a set of points.  What is a convex hull, you ask?  I’m glad you ask, because I had to look it up.  One way to explain it is if you have a graph full of data points…

…and the convex hull is what would be created if you could stretch a rubber band around the outside edge of all the points. 

The gift wrapping algorithm is used to calculate that rubber band.  You can find some interesting demonstrations of the algorithm in use in 2D and 3D data sets here.

Now that you know more about gift wrapping than you ever knew you wanted to know, you can feel proud of yourself as you either relax on the couch, admiring your handiwork under your tree, or you can go back to procrastinating with my blessing.