Did you know that any straight-line drawing on paper can be folded so that the complete drawing can be cut out with one straight scissors cut? That there is a planar linkage that can trace out any algebraic curve, or even 'sign your name'? Or that a 'Latin cross' unfolding of a cube can be refolded to 23 different convex polyhedra? Over the past decade, there has been a surge of interest in such problems, with applications ranging from robotics to protein folding. With an emphasis on algorithmic or computational aspects, this treatment gives hundreds of results and over 60 unsolved 'open problems' to inspire further research. The authors cover one-dimensional (1D) objects (linkages), 2D objects (paper), and 3D objects (polyhedra). Aimed at advanced undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics or computer science, this lavishly illustrated book will fascinate a broad audience, from school students to researchers.
Erik D. Demaine is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy. Demaine's research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a MacArthur Fellowship as a “computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending—moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter”. He appears in the recent origami documentary Between the Folds, cowrote a book about the theory of folding (Geometric Folding Algorithms), and a book about the computational complexity of games (Games, Puzzles, and Computation). Together with his father Martin, his interests span the connections between mathematics and art, including curved-crease sculptures in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Renwick Gallery in the Smithsonian.