Page 12 - My FlipBook

and geometrical patterns in origami’s folds. Unfold an origami piece
to reveal its geometry in the lines that make its folds. Within this
blueprint for the finished piece are triangles, quadrangles, vertices,
acute and obtuse angles, and more. Those shapes and angles follow
rules to successfully create an origami piece. Studying what those
rules are and how they work has led to new discoveries of what folding
can create. Modern origamists are finding that almost any 3D shape
imaginable can be made from paper with origami. It just takes some
new tools and ways of thinking about folding.
Miura made his folding discovery in the 1970s and proved origami
could be a practical solution to engineering problems, such as getting
a solar array into space and then extending it to capture sunlight, in
addition to being a beautiful art form. But Miura was not alone in
studying how origami could be used in science and engineering—many
people around the world were studying the complexities of origami
and its folds. In 1989 scientists, mathematicians, and origamists
gathered in Ferrara, Italy, for an international scientific conference to
share the ways origami, mathematics, and science intersected. This
sharing of knowledge helped to rapidly advance origami science and
mathematics, and the conferences became known as the Origami in
Science, Mathematics, and Education (OSME) conferences. Since
1989 there have been seven OSME conferences around the world, and
many of their proceedings are printed in book form. Attendees share
mathematical models of origami and different applications and research
into origami science—from computer tools that create origami designs
to how much energy folded materials could absorb from a car crash.
One of those early origami science pioneers is former NASA
engineer, physicist, and origamist Robert J. Lang. He makes some
of the most complex origami sculptures in the world and is a leader
in the field of computational origami, a branch of computer science
that studies algorithms to solve paper‑folding problems. In the early
1990s, he created a computer program called TreeMaker for designing

22 FOLDING TECH