The function of folds

摘要

CONVERSATIONS AT THE International Meeting on Origami in Science, Mathematics and Education often pause for a hand to dart into a pocket, emerge with a square of plain paper and fluently fold it up to make a point-both geometrically and rhetorically. The tables at the meeting, which was held in Oxford last September, are strewn with paper constructions that must have taken weeks to make and which participants are nevertheless welcome to handle. But the meeting is not just, or even mostly, about folded paper. It is about the folds themselves: how to design them; how to think about them; how to use them. It is about making creases in everything from steel to sheets of carbon mere atoms thick. It is about differential geometry and elastic moduli. It is about adult nappies and satellite antennae. The more ways are found to fold things up, it seems, the more wide open the field becomes.