Went yesterday Sat 28 Jun to the Bellevue Art Museum to see an utterly fascinating exhibition of ORIGAMI, the ancient Asian art of paper-folding. It turns out ... who knew? certainly not I! -- that there is now a discipline in both abstract math & engineering called -- this is so wild! -- computational origami, where you use a computer to predict the result of folding a piece of paper a certain way. Computational origami has been used to devise ways of folding, e.g., orbiting telescope mirrors that can be fit into a very confined space for launch then unfolded in orbit -- and the optimal way to unfold the telescope element can also be predicted by computational origami. Its basically applied topology! Which reminds me ... a good friend of mine majored in fine arts, learned origami in Japan, and opened an origami gallery in NYC. It was ahead of its time though & didnt catch on. So the business failed & the origami gallery had to fold ... 8-) ... SNARFLE! BURFLE! WHEEFLE! CHOKE! GAG! DROOL! That last part was a little joke ...
Posted on: Sun, 29 Jun 2014 18:21:15 +0000