Fold me baby one more time

I washed and hung my full-sleeved shirt to dry. The toughest part of washing ones clothes is to get them folded after the afternoon sun crisps them. I labor at it every week to get those unwieldy clothes into order, but I never get better at it. That’s when I realized that I have a folding problem.

It turns out that it’s not that uncommon at all. Proteins that run the cellular household have to be folded into intricate shape to make them active.. If they aren’t folded properly the result can be disease like Alzheimers. Likewise DNA has to be folded into a helix, so folding is that trivial afterall.

In everyday life, airbags have to be folded, large lenses have to be folded, fit into spacecrafts and sent to space. Stents have to folded and sent into arteries and unfolded at the right places to remove a clot. Parachutes have to be folded. Basically these are design problems; things have to be folded into smaller dimensions.

This is what the ancient Japanese time pass, origami does. I used to think it was a useless pursuit folding neat sheets of papers into shapes, but one physicist, Robert J. Lang formerly with Caltech has made Origami into a precise science. He has written a program, which will generate complex folding patterns and give the exact location of the folds on paper. His work puts mathematical foundations to origami, in the patterns and locations of folds, spawning new disciplines like Computational origami and Origami mathematics. His algorithm gives efficient and the best way to fold complicated shapes like a dinasaur.

Now he is a full time origami artist and also works as a consultant for many companies and research organizations on their folding problem.

Check out his website

http://www.langorigami.com/

Now I have to go and fold my starched white full sleeve monster.