Hyperbolic parabaloids

The mathematics of origami has been getting a fair amount of attention in recent years. Today's NY Times has an article on the work of Erik Demaine and father, prodigies and polymaths, which has touched on fields as diverse as architecture and biochemistry.

Though I've not had a chance to read far into my recently-acquired copy of Robert J. Lang's Origami Design Secrets: Mathematical Methods for an Ancient Art, this passage from the introduction was eye-opening:

[Origami] is ancient; one would not expect 98 percent of the innovation to come in the last 2 percent of the art's existence! Yet it has. Fifty years ago, all of the different origami designs in the world could have been catalogued on a single typed sheet of paper . . .

Now the number of designs is in the thousands, with the complexity of the most elaborate increased tenfold over the most difficult traditional forms.

Posted by David on February 15, 2005 11:28 AM