Page 13 - BBC Focus - August 2017

AUGUST 2017

MA T H S
COMPUTATIONAL ORIGAMI TAKES A

BIG LEAP FORWARD

minimises the number of seams. “It’s a
An MIT professor of computer science and an boundaries of the original sheet of paper, and
assistant professor in civil engineering at the
University of Tokyo have joined forces to totally different strategy for thinking about
come up with a better way of… making paper how to make a polyhedron,” said Demaine.
rabbits. Or rather, they have created an If you’ve ever unfolded a paper cup from
algorithm that enables the creation of any 3D the water cooler, and ended up with a
shape from a single sheet of a given material. circular piece of paper, that’s the perfect
MIT’s Prof Erik Demaine has previous example of how the new algorithm works – IN NUMBERS
experience in this area: his 1999 PhD thesis the outer edge of the circle ends up as the
described the same thing. The difference, rim of the cup. Demaine’s old method,
though, is that his previous algorithm however, would have created a non-
essentially involved taking a long, thin strip watertight cup shape by winding a thin strip 1,203
of paper or other material and winding it into of paper into a coil.
the desired shape. This tends to leave you The technique could have practical
with lots of seams in the finished 3D shape, applications in manufacturing, particularly KM
and is inefficient in terms of the amount of in areas such as designing and building
paper (or other material) required. The new spacecraft, where materials efficiency is of The distance Chinese
algorithm, on the other hand, preserves the paramount importance. researchers were able
to successfully preserve
quantum entanglement
in a pair of photons – that’s
The new origami algorithm a new record.
can make any shape from a
single sheet of material
66

MILLION

The numbers of trees
planted by 1.5 million
volunteers in Madhya
Pradesh, India in 12 hours
in an attempt to combat
climate change.

5,100

SQUARE KM
The size of a giant iceberg
that broke off an Antarctic
ice shelf in the Weddell Sea.
That’s an area almost
four times the size of
greater London.

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