Academic Origami Publications

My introduction to the possibility of a career in origami came during the Geometric Folding Algorithms class I took in my last semester at MIT.

I saw that there was a whole world of academic origami research and engineering, with a growing number of grants and other funding to support that research.

Then I got my first taste of an academic origami conference at 7OSME, where I presented a poster of my final project for the folding algorithms class.

That project was expanding previous work on mazes done by Jason Ku and Erik Demaine to include mazes on triangle and hexagon grids.

By that point I was pretty hooked on doing origami research and I’d talked my way into a summer studying polycube unfolding in Prolog (see the code here) at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

I’d started designing my own origami tessellations and was translating many origami tessellation patterns to fabric smocking patterns since I’d learned smocking from Adrienne Sack at 7OSME.

Adrienne and I did some joint presentations at PCOC (Pacific Coast Origami Convention, OUSA) and MOVES (Mathematics Of Various Entertaining Subjects, MoMath) in 2019 and we also had some collaborative pieces on display in the National Museum of Mathematics Math Unfolded exhibition associated with the MOVES conference.

In January 2020 I moved to Pittsburgh and started Gathering Folds - right before the Covid pandemic.

I’ve learned a ton about twist-based origami tessellation folding, design, and presentation since then, much of which you can learn about in the other articles on this blog.

Here’s a list of academic articles I’ve had published since starting Gathering Folds:

1. Design Equations for Grid-Based Origami Tessellations in Bridges 2023, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
2. Symmetry Requirements and Design Equations for Origami Tessellations (download author’s manuscript) in 8OSME, Melbourne, Australia, 2024
3. Hybrid Hexagon Twist Interface (download author’s manuscript) in 8OSME, Melbourne, Australia, 2024
4. Rotated Grids for Origami Tessellation Pattern Alignment in Bridges 2024, Richmond, Virginia

The topics in papers 1 and 2 are covered in a more accessible format in this blog post and in my Tessellations by Tiles and Advanced Twist Techniques courses, the topic of paper 3 was developed over several years of Advanced Twist Techniques presentations, and paper 4 is an expansion on this blog post and covers techniques taught in my Project Planning Masterclass.

I’m looking forward to publishing more articles in the future and developing my thinking on origami tessellation design even further!

Articles will be added to this list as they’re published.