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Origami Conferences
Since 1989, there have been several highly successful international scientific conferences exploring the interactions between origami, mathematics, science, and (since 2001) education. The conferences take place at irregular intervals—basically, whenever a general chair and sponsoring organization decide that the time has come for the next. Beginning in 2015, the OSME series of conferences is guided […]
Continue Reading4OSME
2006-10-16 Update: 4OSME was a rousing success! Over 165 people attended some 70 talks. The 4OSME proceedings has been published by A K Peters, Ltd (now part of CRC Press). Several media groups covered 4OSME. See photographs and a trailer from Green Fuse Films’ Peabody-award-winning documentary on origami (portions of which were filmed at 4OSME), […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge at OrigamiUSA
In 2003, Daniel Robinson, Satoshi Kamiya, and I were sitting together at the OrigamiUSA annual meeting, talking about the process of composition and design and comparing thoughts and ideas. Brian Chan’s “Kraken Attack”, from 2006. I should mention that this is not at all unusual. Origami, unlike many other fields, is remarkably collegial, and the […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2010
The 2010 challenge was: Cars and Trucks. In recent years, we’ve stuck with the natural world, but this year we decied to visit man-made objects. A selection of the year’s entries are shown below. Brian Chan and I each took on sports cars, with the idea of doing the wheels in a way different from […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2009
The 2009 design challenge was one of the four nonhuman great apes: Gorilla, Orangutan, Chimpanzee, or Bonobo. The last few design challenges have been very open-ended, which has allowed artists to display great creativity in subject. For this next challenge, however, we decided to constrain the subject to emphasize implementation—and in particular, to challenge the […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2008
The 2008 design challenge was a prehistoric non-dino from an uncut square. What does that mean? Well, there are many, many dinosaurs in origami, but there are also many prehistoric creatures that are as cool, or cooler, than dinos, but have not yet been realized in origami. So whether one is an aficionado of the […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2007
The 2007 design challenge was to fold an entire plant from an uncut square. There are many origami plants (you can see several in my own gallery), but nearly all origami plants are either composite, i.e., from multiple sheets of paper, or only partial plants (like a leaf, or blossom). The challenge this year was […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2006
The topic of the 2006 design challenge was a sailing ship. It wasn’t that this topic hadn’t been done before; the symbol of OrigamiUSA is a simple traditional sailboat, and on the complex side, Pat Crawford’s brilliant “Full-Rigged Sailing Ship” is one of the most well-known origami figures in existence. But Crawford’s ship dates from […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2005
Attack of the Hermit Crabs! At the 2004 OrigamiUSA convention, Satoshi and I examined each other’s Eupatorus (and unmercifully razzed Dan Robinson for his no-show). It had been an enjoyable challenge, and so we decided to try it again for the following year. The subject we chose was a hermit crab—a type of crab that […]
Continue ReadingDesign Challenge 2004
The original design competition was for a Eupatorus gracilicornis beetle, which makes a good subject for origami because of its large number of hornlike protrusions. ( See here for some examples of the real thing.) Although 3 of us originally agreed to take on this subject, Daniel Robinson was otherwise occupied, so only Satoshi Kamiya […]
Continue ReadingOrigamiUSA’s The Fold
Starting in November, 2010, I began writing a regular column on crease patterns (with occasional forays into other topics) for OrigamiUSA’s then-new online publication, The Fold. You’ll need to be a member of OrigamiUSA to read the articles, but in my highly biased opinion, it’s well worth the cost (not just for my articles, but […]
Continue ReadingDoodling with Sensei
As you may have seen, the Google Doodle for March 14, 2012 is made of origami and celebrates the 101st birthday of Akira Yoshizawa, the father of the modern origami art. Origami has a multi-century history as a folk art in Japan, and Yoshizawa was not the only, or even the first, of his countrymen […]
Continue ReadingOrigami Diagramming Conventions
Diagramming, Part I These articles were written in 1989–1991. Despite many changes in the origami world over the following decades, the recommendations remain basically sound. I’ve updated a few bits with some footnotes. Origami is an international phenomenon that has moved far beyond its traditional boundaries of Japan and Spain. Its practitioners are found world-wide, […]
Continue ReadingGoogle’s Doodle: Akira Yoshizawa
The Google Doodle for March 14, 2012, honored Akira Yoshizawa, the father of modern origami, on his 101st birthday. The Doodle featured the Google logo, folded from origami (each letter folded from a single uncut sheet), decorated with origami butterflies folded from one of Yoshizawa’s most famous and iconic designs. In the week or so […]
Continue ReadingA Familiar Name
Written in 2009. See also Connections. So here I am, in Ithaca, NY, giving a talk at their Light in Winter Festival. It’s my usual math + origami + science + technology + all-this-stuff-is-tied-together spiel. At the end of the talk, there’s the usual Q&A, and then the formal stuff breaks up and individuals walk […]
Continue ReadingConnections (with apologies to James Burke)
This was written in 1997. See also A Familiar Name. In 1992, I left my job researching lasers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena and moved to a small company in San Jose called SDL, which designs and manufactures a wide variety of the type of laser called a “semiconductor laser.” San Jose is […]
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