by: Elise Miller
Member of the Bettina Network Lifestyle Community
Our son, Ravi, first became interested in origami at age three and a half-years-old, when we followed the instructions in Curious George for making a paper boat. In the book, George had made boats out of the newspapers that he was supposed to be delivering to people’s houses. I then found some old origami paper at home, and over the next two or three years, Ravi went from making cranes to complicated tessellations.
During that time, a friend suggested we watch the documentary “Between the Folds” (
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/between-the-folds/). My husband and I were utterly astonished to find that origami was not only a fine art, but a critical tool for physicists, mathematicians and engineers to develop crease patterns for everything from telescope lenses to heart stents. In fact, one of the people featured on “Between the Folds” is Robert Lang, PhD, a physicist and “paper-folder”, who used origami to create the design for the Hubble telescope (
http://www.langorigami.com/article/eyeglass-telescope). Also featured was Erik Demaine, PhD, who became the youngest professor ever at MIT and has an office full of origami models (
http://erikdemaine.org).
We were so inspired by this film that we all decided to attend the International Origami Convention held in New York City annually (
https://origamiusa.org/conventions) to meet Dr. Lang and other leaders in the burgeoning field of origami engineering. The few hundred people who attended, many of whom were kids like Ravi, were remarkable for their creativity, intensity, intelligence and ability to make just about anything imaginable out of one piece of paper. We also learned that geometric algorithms (based on origami techniques) were starting to be used to develop self-folding robots (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVYz7g-qLjs). In fact, just in the last couple years or so, new academic programs and departments have sprung up at major universities for origami engineering (
http://www.livescience.com/49121-origami-inspired-engineering-is-expanding.html). Little did we know that reading
Curious George would ultimately lead us to the cutting edge of science and engineering!
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