Math Origami

Flickr user fdecomite showcases his beautiful portfolio of geometry-inspired papercraft. His dedication to the craft is astounding. Get ready to take a journey down the rabbit hole cuz this work gets trippy. Behind the scenes process photos: Previously, Damn, This Dude Knows ...more

Eric Gjerde is a master of origami who devotes much of his energy on origami tessellations. Some of his pieces fold nearly flat, forming layers that add just a hint of depth. These pieces look beautiful when lit from behind, due to the variations in brightness and color. Other ...more

It's once again Monday, which means it's time to highlight some of the most recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. I also thought we'd take a look at building a model that has appeared in numerous posts. It's the simplest of the intersecting plane mod ...more

Just watched PBS origami doc Between the Folds last night. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend it. It's a beautiful film, really inspiring. Lots of Math Craft-related subject matter. Available instant on Netflix, or for rent on iTunes.

Here at WonderHowTo we're overflowing with top-notch origami tutorials. However, when it comes to the lesser known art of kirigami, we could always use a couple more enthusiasts. Kirigami is a form of origami that (unlike origami) involves making intricate cuts, and the result ...more

It's Monday, which means once again, it's time to highlight some of the most recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. I also thought we'd take a look at building a sliceform model of a hyperbolic paraboloid. Rachel Mansur put up two posts on her Modula ...more

It's Monday, which means once again, it's time to highlight some of the recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. I also thought that we'd try and create something known as an "Orderly Tangle" or "Polylink". This week we had a few submissions based off ...more

I got hooked on origami sometime after Math Craft admin Cory Poole posted instructions for creating modular origami, but I had to take a break to finish a quilt I've been working on for a while now. It's my first quilt, and very simple in its construction (straight up squares, ...more

WonderHowTo is made up niche communities called Worlds. If you've yet to join one (or create your own), get a taste below of what's going on in the community. Check in every Wednesday for a roundup of new activities and projects. This week: A double exposure cell phone photog ...more

WonderHowTo is made up niche communities called Worlds. If you've yet to join one (or create your own), get a taste below of what's going on in the community. Check in every Wednesday for a roundup of new activities and projects. This week: Create a redstone calculator in Min ...more

Oh, what fun you can have with a little math + a little origami. Bradford Hansen-Smith folds intricate geometric sculptures entirely from paper plates and is kind enough to offer a few HowTo's to get you started. Examples of his work below; scroll all the way down for the How ...more

I spent the holiday weekend becoming fluent in the basics of modular origami. With practice, you can churn out the below models surprisingly quickly. Icosahedron, Octahedron & Cube. My first attempt at the octahedron can be seen here, which I found was actually a bit tougher t ...more

I've already posted a brief roundup of interesting models folded by Michal Kosmulski, expert orgami-ist and IT director at NetSprint. However, I didn't include my favorite model, because I felt it deserved its own post. Kosmulski folded an elaborate and large Sierpinski tetrah ...more

WonderHowTo is made up niche communities called Worlds. If you've yet to join one (or create your own), get a taste below of what's going on in the community. Check in every Wednesday for a roundup of new activities and projects. Happy Thanksgiving! We hope everyone enjoys th ...more

I came across this Dutch site called "Wat Maakt Suzette Nu?", which featured a project created with Math Craft instructions for modular origami. Suzette, the creator, did an incredible job in terms of craftsmanship and color... But what I like most of all is that these object ...more

It's Monday, which means once again, it's time to highlight some of the recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. In this post, we'll also make a flexagon, which is a type of transformable object. Rachel Mansur of Giveaway Tuesdays posted several pictur ...more

Erik Demaine is a Professor of Electronic Engineering and Comp Sci at MI, but he is also an origami folder who has had work displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. He makes some beautiful models and intricate puzzles, but in my opinion the really inspirational work is th ...more

Last week Math Craft admin Cory Poole demonstrated how to make three of the platonic solids from Sonobe units: the cube, the octahedron, and the icosohedron; but where was the dodecahedron? I was pushed to find out how to make a sonobe dodecahedron from this beautiful picture ...more

Richard Sweeney is an incredible artist whose body of work consists mainly of sculptures made from paper. His art is often related to origami, and much of his work is related to geometrical forms. I personally really love his modular forms in paper. Many of them are based off ...more

Last post, the Sonobe unit was introduced as a way to use multiple copies of a simply folded piece of paper to make geometric objects. In this post, we are going to explore that concept further by making two more geometric models. The first is the truncated icosahedron, which ...more

Modular origami is a technique that can be used to build some pretty interesting and impressive models of mathematical objects. In modular origami, you combine multiple units folded from single pieces of paper into more complicated forms. The Sonobe unit is a simple example un ...more

Here's a Math Craft project that takes less than 20 minutes, has an attractive, practical result, and is at least a little mind-blowing due to folding along curves. The designer of these boxes is Phillip Chapman-Bell, who runs an amazing origami blog and has a spectacular fli ...more

We've all made them. I remember making hundreds of paper snowflakes when I was in elementary school. You take a piece of paper and fold it in half, then fold it in half again. You now have a piece that is one fourth the size of the original. Now you fold it in half diagonally. ...more

Last Thursday's post demonstrated how to Make Yin-Yang Pillow boxes, which were based on equilateral triangles and squares. The units for making these boxes were created by Phillip Chapman-Bell, who runs an amazing origami blog and has a spectacular flickr photostream. Using t ...more

It's once again Monday, which means it's time to highlight some of the most recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. Since two of these posts were on polyhedral versions of M.C. Escher's tessellations, I thought we'd take a look at building a simple tes ...more

WonderHowTo is made up niche communities called Worlds. If you've yet to join one (or create your own), get a taste below of what's going on in the community. Check in every Wednesday for a roundup of new activities and projects. Hacking, crafting, mining & more… just another ...more

It's another Monday, which means it's once again time to highlight some of the recent community submissions posted to the Math Craft corkboard. Additionally, I thought we'd take a look at the process of stellation and make some stellated polyhedra out of paper.Rachel Mansur of ...more

Math Craft admin Cory Poole provided quite a few recipes for sonobe models in his blog, and I followed one to make the pentakis dodecahedron here. I wasn't that happy with my first result because the colours kept on coming out wrong—i.e. two of the same colour next to each ot ...more

Math Craft admin Cory Poole posted instructions on How to Make a Cube, Octahedron & Icosahedron from Sonobe Units, plus some great complex models in his article, How to Make a Truncated Icosahedron, Pentakis Dodecahedron & More. These models use the standard sonobe unit and a ...more

Here's a great excuse to play with your food—and learn some math while you're at it. We've all seen a hexaflexagon folded out of paper, but how about a burrito? Vi Hart, a "mathmusician" over at the Khan Academy, came up with the Flex Mex, a burrito folded into a hexaflexagon ...more

I have never been the most artistic person in the world, but never overlook a great piece of work when I see one. With George Lucas selling the Star Wars franchise to Disney for more money than I could make in ten lifetimes, it's safe to say the franchise has a lot of fans. S ...more

Everyone knows how to make paper snowflakes, but the kind you learned to cut in kindergarten can get a little boring. However, they are free DIY holiday decorations, and they don't have to be a generic snowflake design. They can be anything you want, from nerdy math kirigami t ...more