Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2016
The cracking or tearing of thin sheets of material is of considerable interest in modern-day engineering. A recent investigation into the behaviour of concrete indicated that it would be of interest to consider a probabilistic model in which a crack is regarded as some form of non-self-intersecting random walk in the plane. This paper considers some simple models and in the Appendix are included some results on paper tearing.