Origami,geometry and art

The purpose of this paper is to describe the mathematics that emanates from the construction of an origami box. We first construct a simple origami box from a rectangular sheet and then discuss some of the mathematical questions that arise in the context of geometry and algebra. The activity can be used as a context for illustrating how algebra and geometry, like other branches of mathematics, are interrelated.     

Mathematical thinking and origami

The purpose of this paper is to describe the mathematics that emanates from the construction of an origami box. We first construct a simple origami box from a rectangular sheet and then discuss some of the mathematical questions that arise in the context of geometry and calculus.     

Mathematical art and artistic mathematics

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this note is to describe the mathematics that emanates from the construction of an origami box. We first construct a simple origami box from two rectangular sheets and then discuss some of the mathematical questions that arise in the context of geometry and algebra.     

(Non)Existence of Pleated Folds: How Paper Folds Between Creases

We prove that the pleated hyperbolic paraboloid, a familiar origami model known since 1927, in fact cannot be folded with the standard crease pattern in the standard mathematical model of zero-thickness paper. In contrast, we show that the model can be folded with additional creases, suggesting that real paper “folds” into this model via small such creases. We conjecture that the circular version of this model, consisting simply of concentric circular creases, also folds without extra creases. At the heart of our results is a new structural theorem characterizing uncreased intrinsically flat surfaces—the portions of paper between the creases. Differential geometry has much to say about the local behavior of such surfaces when they are sufficiently smooth, e.g., that they are torsal ruled. But this classic result is simply false in the context of the whole surface. Our structural characterization tells the whole story, and even applies to surfaces with discontinuities in the second derivative. We use our theorem to prove fundamental properties about how paper folds, for example, that straight creases on the piece of paper must remain piecewise-straight (polygonal) by folding.     

Geodesic Universal Molecules

The first phase of TreeMaker, a well-known method for origami design, decomposes a planar polygon (the “paper”) into regions. If some region is not convex, TreeMaker indicates it with an error message and stops. Otherwise, a second phases is invoked which computes a crease pattern called a “universal molecule”. In this paper we introduce and study geodesic universal molecules, which also work with non-convex polygons and thus extend the applicability of the TreeMaker method. We characterize the family of disk-like surfaces, crease patterns and folded states produced by our generalized algorithm. They include non-convex polygons drawn on the surface of an intrinsically flat piecewise-linear surface which have self-overlap when laid open flat, as well as surfaces with negative curvature at a boundary vertex.     

Toric origami manifolds and multi-fans

The notion of a toric origami manifold, which weakens the notion of a symplectic toric manifold, was introduced by A. Cannas da Silva, V. Guillemin and A.R. Pires. They showed that toric origami manifolds bijectively correspond to origami templates via moment maps, where an origami template is a collection of Delzant polytopes with some folding data. Like a fan is associated to a Delzant polytope, a multi-fan introduced by A. Hattori and M. Masuda can be associated to an oriented origami template. In this paper, we discuss their relationship and show that any simply connected compact smooth 4-manifold with a smooth action of T ² can be a toric origami manifold. We also characterize products of even dimensional spheres which can be toric origami manifolds.     

Equivariant Chern Classes of Orientable Toric Origami Manifolds∗

A toric origami manifold, introduced by Cannas da Silva, Guillemin and Pires, is a generalization of a toric symplectic manifold. For a toric symplectic manifold, its equivariant Chern classes can be described in terms of the corresponding Delzant polytope and the stabilization of its tangent bundle splits as a direct sum of complex line bundles. But in general a toric origami manifold is not simply connected, so the algebraic topology of a toric origami manifold is more difficult than a toric symplectic manifold. In this paper they give an explicit formula of the equivariant Chern classes of an oriented toric origami manifold in terms of the corresponding origami template. Furthermore, they prove the stabilization of the tangent bundle of an oriented toric origami manifold also splits as a direct sum of complex line bundles.     

On the combinatorics of an origami model

We consider the problem of how the assembly process of an origami model, made up of similar pieces, can be completed given that at each step there are several choices. A result is given in the language of graphs that provides a sufficient condition under which assembly of the model will never fail.     

Determination of the effective elasticity tensor of a folded sandwich core

This document describes the homogenization of a folded sandwich core. By using a numerical homogenization concept the components of the elasticity tensor of the foldcore continuum are determined. The foldcore exhibits an effective orthotropic behaviour with the particularity that it can be auxetic. (© 2014 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

How to best fold a triangle

We fold a triangle once along a straight line and study how small the area of the folded figure can be. It can always be as small as the fraction \(2-\sqrt{2}\) of the area of the original triangle.This is best possible: For every positive number \(\varepsilon\) there are triangles that cannot be folded better than \(2-\sqrt{2}-\varepsilon\).     

Normal origamis of Mumford curves

An origami (also known as square-tiled surface) is a Riemann surface covering a torus with at most one branch point. Lifting two generators of the fundamental group of the punctured torus decomposes the surface into finitely many unit squares. By varying the complex structure of the torus one obtains easily accessible examples of Teichmüller curves in the moduli space of Riemann surfaces. The p-adic analogues of Riemann surfaces are Mumford curves. A p-adic origami is defined as a covering of Mumford curves with at most one branch point, where the bottom curve has genus one. A classification of all normal non-trivial p-adic origamis is presented and used to calculate some invariants. These can be used to describe p-adic origamis in terms of glueing squares.     

Student teachers’ concept definitions of area and their understanding about two-dimensionality of area

We examine what kind of concept definitions of area a group of Finnish primary and lower secondary student teachers (N = 82) use, and how the quality of the definitions is associated with the participants’ success in seven exercises involving area. We are especially interested in how the understanding of the two-dimensionality of area appears in the participants’ responses. Only six student teachers were able to give a mathematically precise and correct definition of area. Altogether 26 participants defined it as ‘the size of a figure’ and 20 respondents required that a figure must be bounded. Further, 22 of them associated area with a formula or an example and eight respondents gave an incorrect or nonsensical definition. On average, student teachers master rather well the area formulae of a circle and a rectangle but already the relationship between the surface area of a cube and its volume is less commonly perceived. Most student teachers associate the area of an irregular domain with the method of exhaustion but clearly fewer of them acknowledge the difference between the area and an approximation of it. Surprisingly, there is only a weak Spearman correlation between the participants’ scores in the test exercises and the qualitatively ordered categories of concept definitions.     

Interaction of the folded Whitney umbrella and swallowtail in slow-fast systems

The graph of a first integral of a smooth slow-fast system with two slow variables is a singular surface in the three-dimensional space; the variation of an external parameter on which the system depends gives rise to perestroikas (=transitions) of this surface. We find a normal form and present figures of the perestroika that describes the interaction between the swallowtail and folded Whitney umbrella on the graph of a first integral of a generic one-parameter family of such systems.     

Elastic-plastic halfspace simulation

Due to the roughness of technical surfaces only the surface peaks are in contact for moderate contact pressures. Thus, the real contact area is smaller than the apparent contact area. Contact forces can only occur in the real contact area. Consequently it is necessary to determine the deformation of surface asperities in order to analyse the tribological properties of surfaces. The real contact area is usually small in initial contact. This leads to large contact pressures which in turn lead to the plastic deformation of surface roughness peaks. Therefore an elastic-plastic model is necessary. The halfspace model seems to be beneficial because there is only a system of equations on a surface mesh to be solved and not on a volume mesh like in the Finite-Element-Method. This leads to a much smaller system of equations which should allow reasonable calculation times even for large contact surfaces. (© 2011 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)     

Robust intersection of structured hexahedral meshes and degenerate triangle meshes with volume fraction applications

Two methods for calculating the volume and surface area of the intersection between a triangle mesh and a rectangular hexahedron are presented. The main result is an exact method that calculates the polyhedron of intersection and thereafter the volume and surface area of the fraction of the hexahedral cell inside the mesh. The second method is approximate, and estimates the intersection by a least squares plane. While most previous publications focus on non-degenerate triangle meshes, we here extend the methods to handle geometric degeneracies. In particular, we focus on large-scale triangle overlaps, or double surfaces. It is a geometric degeneracy that can be hard to solve with existing mesh repair algorithms. There could also be situations in which it is desirable to keep the original triangle mesh unmodified. Alternative methods that solve the problem without altering the mesh are therefore presented. This is a step towards a method that calculates the solid area and volume fractions of a degenerate triangle mesh including overlapping triangles, overlapping meshes, hanging nodes, and gaps. Such triangle meshes are common in industrial applications. The methods are validated against three industrial test cases. The validation shows that the exact method handles all addressed geometric degeneracies, including double surfaces, small self-intersections, and split hexahedra.     

The minimum size instance of a Pallet Loading Problem equivalence class

The Pallet Loading Problem (PLP) maximizes the number of identical rectangular boxes placed within a rectangular pallet. Boxes may be rotated 90° so long as they are packed with edges parallel to the pallet’s edges, i.e., in an orthogonal packing. This paper defines the Minimum Size Instance (MSI) of an equivalence class of PLP, and shows that every class has one and only one MSI. We develop bounds on the dimensions of box and pallet for the MSI of any class. Applying our new bounds on MSI dimensions, we present an algorithm for MSI generation and use it to enumerate all 3,080,730 equivalence classes with an area ratio (pallet area divided by box area) smaller than 101 boxes. Previous work only provides bounds on the ratio of box dimensions and only considers a subset of all classes presented here.     

Wrapping spheres with flat paper

We study wrappings of smooth (convex) surfaces by a flat piece of paper or foil. Such wrappings differ from standard mathematical origami because they require infinitely many infinitesimally small folds (“crumpling”) in order to transform the flat sheet into a surface of nonzero curvature. Our goal is to find shapes that wrap a given surface, have small area and small perimeter (for efficient material usage), and tile the plane (for efficient mass production). Our results focus on the case of wrapping a sphere. We characterize the smallest square that wraps the unit sphere, show that a 0.1% smaller equilateral triangle suffices, and find a 20% smaller shape contained in the equilateral triangle that still tiles the plane and has small perimeter.     

Multivariate splines and polytopes

In this paper, we use multivariate splines to investigate the volume of polytopes. We first present an explicit formula for the multivariate truncated power, which can be considered as a dual version of the famous Brion’s formula for the volume of polytopes. We also prove that the integration of polynomials over polytopes can be dealt with by using the multivariate truncated power. Moreover, we show that the volume of cube slicing can be considered as the maximum value of the box spline. On the basis of this connection, we give a simple proof for Good’s conjecture, which has been settled before by probability methods.     

Realising countable groups as automorphisms of origamis on the Loch Ness monster

Archiv der Mathematik - It is known that every finite group can be represented as the full group of automorphisms of a suitable compact origami. In this paper, we provide a short argument to note...     

C 1 Quintic Splines on Type-4 Tetrahedral Partitions

Starting with a partition of a rectangular box into subboxes, it is shown how to construct a natural tetrahedral (type-4) partition and associated trivariate C ¹ quintic polynomial spline spaces with a variety of useful properties, including stable local bases and full approximation power. It is also shown how the spaces can be used to solve certain Hermite and Lagrange interpolation problems.