How a Mathematician Approaches Origami | Dr. Robert Lang

[Music] I design things in different ways some things are strictly from intuition just take a sheet of paper and put in folds knowing what the effect of those folds are going to be and that's usually for fairly simple things for complex pieces I will lay out a design on paper before I ever start folding and I've developed a bunch of techniques in which I establish a correspondence between the features of the shape arms legs and wings and patterns of creases on the paper that forms simple geometric shapes squares rectangles circles hexagons and so when I'm designing the figure I create these little shapes that represent all the parts I arrange them on the paper to find a neat arrangement where they all sort of snap together almost like puzzle pieces and once I found that arrangement on the paper then I can follow some pretty codified rules for adding fold lines in such a way that that patterning will now fold down to something that resembles the shape that I'm after it won't look exactly like it it won't have all the folds that I need at the end but it'll give me the arms and the legs and the wings leaves petals and flower parts of a flower if that's what I'm doing and then I can go back to intuitive folding to do the final shaping that gives me the finished shape figuring out what to include is the artistic challenge it's what what shapes are important to conveying the essence of this subject and different origami artists like different artists in any other media make different choices about what's important to them what what appeals to your mind's eye most of the time for me I like a fair amount of detail and what I make I'll look at the the actual subject of real flower plant or whatever and kind of ask myself what are the important lines of this subject you know what stands out to me and and what aspect of the subject really conveys the essence the character flower and it is purely an aesthetic choice an artistic decision but once I've chosen what those features are then I switch to a much more systematic mathematical approach of rendering each of those subjects as an element of my overall design [Music]

Channel: TEALEAVES

Views: 9,857

Keywords: Tealeaves, Tealeaves.com, Tea, Luxury Tea, origami, robert lang, NASA, physics, math, mathematician, design, environment, eco, green, green hobbies, origami art, expert, garden of secrets, UBC, botanical garden

Id: az4mUGJpfW0

Length: 2min 50sec (170 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019