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Origamicolloquium2 17 12

Origami is the art of paper folding using basic tools like a square of paper and mountain and valley folds. Mathematics plays an important role in origami, including determining when a crease pattern can be folded flat without intersections and optimizing designs. Key concepts in the mathematics of origami include the Huzita-Hatori axioms, flat-foldability theorems, circle packing for efficient designs, and computational tools like TreeMaker for adding details systematically. Origami also has practical applications at many scales, from solar sails to medical devices.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
130 views24 pages

Origamicolloquium2 17 12

Origami is the art of paper folding using basic tools like a square of paper and mountain and valley folds. Mathematics plays an important role in origami, including determining when a crease pattern can be folded flat without intersections and optimizing designs. Key concepts in the mathematics of origami include the Huzita-Hatori axioms, flat-foldability theorems, circle packing for efficient designs, and computational tools like TreeMaker for adding details systematically. Origami also has practical applications at many scales, from solar sails to medical devices.

Uploaded by

Khoa Nguyen
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Mathematics of Origami

Angela Kohlhaas
Loras College
February 17, 2012
Introduction
 Origami
 ori + kami, “folding paper”
 Tools: one uncut square of paper, mountain and valley folds
 Goal: create art with elegance, balance, detail

 Outline
 History
 Applications
 Foldability
 Design
History of Origami
 105 A.D.: Invention of paper in China
 Paper-folding begins shortly after in China, Korea, Japan
 800s: Japanese develop basic models for ceremonial folding
 1200s: Origami globalized throughout Japan
 1682: Earliest book to describe origami
 1797: How to fold 1,000 cranes published
 1954: Yoshizawa’s book formalizes a notational system
 1940s-1960s: Origami popularized in the U.S. and
throughout the world
History of Origami Mathematics
 1893: Geometric exercises in paper folding by Row
 1936: Origami first analyzed according to axioms by Beloch
 1989-present:
 Huzita-Hatori axioms
 Flat-folding theorems: Maekawa, Kawasaki, Justin, Hull
 TreeMaker designed by Lang
 Origami sekkei – “technical origami”
 Rigid origami
 Applications from the large to very small
Miura-Ori
 Japanese solar sail
“Eyeglass” space telescope
 Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Science of the small
 Heart stents
 Titanium hydride printing

 DNA origami
 Protein-folding
Two broad categories

 Foldability (discrete, computational complexity)


 Given a pattern of creases, when does the folded
model lie flat?

 Design (geometry, optimization)


 How much detail can added to an origami model,
and how efficiently can this be done?
Flat-Foldability of Crease Patterns

 Three criteria for 𝛗:


Continuity, Piecewise isometry, Noncrossing
2-Colorable

 Under the mapping 𝛗,


some faces are flipped
while others are only
translated and rotated.
Maekawa-Justin Theorem

At any interior vertex, the number


of mountain and valley folds differ by two.
Kawasaki-Justin Theorem

At any interior vertex,


a given crease pattern can be folded flat
if and only if
alternating angles sum to 180 degrees.
Layer ordering

 No self-intersections
 A face cannot penetrate another face
 A face cannot penetrate a fold
 A fold cannot penetrate a fold

 Global flat-foldability is hard!


 NP-complete
Map-folding Problem

Given a rectangle partitioned into


an m by n grid of squares with
mountain/valley crease assignments,
can the map be folded flat into one square?
Origami design
 Classic origami (intuition and trial-and-error):

 Origami sekkei (intuition and algorithms): examples


 What changed?
 Appendages were added efficiently
 Paper usage was optimized
Classic bases

 Kite  Fish
base base

 Bird  Frog
base base
Classic bases

 Kite  Fish
base base

 Bird  Frog
base base
Adding appendages

Suppose we want to design an origami


creature with n appendages of equal length.
What is the most efficient use of paper?
That is, how can we make the appendages as
long as possible?
Circle-packing!
Circle-packing!
n=25 Sea Urchin

 TreeMaker examples
Margulis Napkin Problem

Prove that no matter how one folds


a square napkin, the flattened shape
can never have a perimeter that exceeds
the perimeter of the original square.
Re-cap
 An ancient art modernized by mathematical methods
 Origami is like math: applications may be centuries behind
 Foldability
 2-coloring, local vertex conditions, noncrossing
 Map-folding
 Design
 Circle-packing
 TreeMaker
 Flipside: origami methods can be useful in math, too!
References
 Barry Cipra. “In the Fold: Origami meets Mathematics.” SIAM
News, Vol. 34, No. 8.
 Erik Demaine and Joseph O’Rourke. Geometric Folding Algorithms:
Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
 Thomas Hull. Project Origami: Activities for Exploring Mathematics. A
K Peters, Ltd., 2006.
 Robert Lang. Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an
Ancient Art. A K Peters, Ltd., 2003.
 Robert Lang, “Robert Lang folds way-new origami.” TED
conference, www.ted.com, 2008.
 Jonathan Schneider. “Flat-Foldability of Origami Crease Patterns.”
Manuscript, 2005.

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