So began an early chapter in the physics and mathematics of crumpled paper. And now the latest advancement arrives with Mr. Gottesman’s recent contribution, “A state variable for crumpled thin sheets,” which proposed that crumpling dynamics may not be hopelessly complex after all.

“The surprising thing about the result is that it’s very, very simple,” said Shmuel M. Rubinstein, a physicist and the study’s principal investigator, although he emphasized that Mr. Gottesman did most of the work. “What Omer showed is that perhaps the most important aspect of a phenomenon that’s considered to be really chaotic — a paradigm of disorder and complexity and uncertainty, like the butterfly-flapping-its-wings metaphor — is remarkably predictable, deterministic and simple.”

How to ‘kvetch’ paper

The methodology was straightforward, anyway. In the lab, Mr. Gottesman crushed hundreds of sheets of paper in a cylindrical container. This was scientific paper, elastoplastic Mylar sheets, which were less likely to inflict paper cuts, or to wilt into a tissue when subjected to repeated crumpling.

Some early trial runs, posted on his website as “fun paper stuff,” involved “kvetching” a vertical tube of paper with an empty coffee can. (“Kvetch,” a Yiddish word that usually means “complain” but translates literally as “squeeze” or “press,” became a term of endearment around the lab, as stacks of paper complained about their fate.)

Like a palm reader intuiting a life line, Mr. Gottesman analyzed the creases of the crumpled paper and sought to tease out a variable, an equation, a law — something that predicted what would occur with the next crumple.

He toyed with a number of variables: the range of individual crease lengths; the distances between creases; the largest patch without creases; the sharpness of creases, and the amount of energy needed to cause crumpling.