In the late 1990s, Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, and Anna Lubiw proved that any pattern made from straight line segments in the plane—connected or not—can be cut out of a piece of paper by first making some strategic folds and then making a single cut. This is the now-famous Fold-and-Cut Theorem. (See Erik Demaine’s website,…
Tag: folding
Folding a golden rectangle
Recently I wrote about the mathematics of cutting and folding paper and about the golden ratio, . Here’s a video that brings these two ideas together. We see how to create a golden rectangle (a rectangle for which the ratio of the sides is ) by folding a piece of paper. [via Anthony Brand’s maths…
Cutting and folding paper
Inspired by Chaim Goodman-Strauss’s recent video about symmetries, paper snowflakes, and paper dolls, I decided to post a few other paper-related videos. First is a video showing some cutting tricks for a Möbius strip. I show this to my topology class, then have them play around with Möbius strips—twisting them various numbers of times and…
David Richeson: Division by Zero 