Folds, cuts and isometries: art and science

For millennia, origami and kirigami artists have used folds and cuts to create beautiful shapes from a simple sheet of paper. I will describe our recent scientific attempts to catch up with these remarkably imaginative arts phrased as inverse problems in physical geometry that aim to control the shape and rigidity of a thin surface. Using discrete operations that vary the number, size, orientation and coordination of folds and cuts, I will show how to create piecewise isometric kirigami and origami tessellations and control their local and global morphology and mechanical response, mixing experimental, computational and theoretical approaches. 

Speaker: L. Mahadevan, Harvard University