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Originally Posted by NatCh
Probably some crazy european ('cause it's metric) philosopher-mathematician-printer type.
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Exactly.
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1 July 1742 – 24 February 1799). He was an 18th-century German scientist, satirist and anglophile, most famous for his notebooks published posthumously (which he himself called "waste books", using the English bookkeeping term).
He obviously didn't know metric units, he just proposed sheets with proportions of 1 to sqrt(2)
Please note that nobody knows how american "letter" aehm.. "standard" came into being, or why it is 11 inches tall (and not 10 1/2 as it was in the history)
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Originally Posted by NatCh
Is there any actual advantage to it aside from being able to fold an A4 in half to reliably simulate two A5's?
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Yes. There are quite a few advantages.
See a VERY interesting article at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...oldid=80262785
Not the last of those advantages is that it is THE STANDARD.
The only countries that did noit adopt the standard are:
USA, Canada. Yes. Even in The United kingdom they use ISO standard since 1959.
;-)