(soft music) - I discovered origami
when I was about six. I received a book that
had some instructions for three or four
traditional designs in it, and I thought, oh, this is a fun puzzle. Let's try to follow these instructions and make these figures, and
eventually, I succeeded, but then I was struck
by how beautiful it was that one could create
all the different shapes with nothing more than a sheet
of paper and one's hands. I've been interested in
origami my entire life, but origami was one of many passions. I loved nature, and I loved
the beauty of mathematics, and so I got my bachelor's
degree in electrical engineering. For my PhD, I switched to applied physics, specifically focusing on lasers,
and that became my career. Along the way, though, I had been pursuing this passion of origami. I'd had an idea for a
book about how to design that gathered all of the
design techniques in one place. There were plenty of other people who could do laser
research, but I felt like I was the only one who
could write this book, so I quit my job in 2001 and
set out to write the book that became Origami Design Secrets. After I quit and started
working on the book, I also started following up on leads for commercial development
and applications of origami, and that turned into a career as a full time origami
artist and consultant. I say I use a lot of math in my designing, and a lot of people might
think that that means I'm doing arithmetic or
algebra or even calculus, but math is much broader
than just those fields. Fundamentally, math is
the study of patterns and relationships, and a
lot of the math that I use involves manipulating shapes,
moving around circles, squares, hexagons, T shapes, L shapes, different shaped polygons that represent different structures and
patterns in the design. I don't think I could've planned the career path that I took. Opportunities arose and I took
them when they came along, but I couldn't have guessed
that this or that opportunity would lead me to where I am today. I think one of the most
important things I could give advice to anyone, whether
they're doing origami or any other field, is to
follow their curiosity. Some of those things we
pursue for curiosity's sake could turn out to have an
application down the road, but curiosity itself is
reason enough to pursue them. I'm often asked if I
need to have patience, and I think it's a truism
that you don't need patience to do something you love to do.
