the moment I saw the homework assignment, I immediately thought that I would measure it by attempting to cut a shape of known area, and weighing that piece. Then weighting the whole sheet and multiplying by the known mass per a unit of area (this is how we used to do it for figuring the area under a chromatography trace.)\n\nFor the sides, I was thinking I would cut the paper into several pieces and stack them, to get the thickness of the paper, but I am not sure how precisely the cut edge of the paper matches its thickness.