How to Fold It

Joseph O'Rourke is Professor and Chair of the Computer Science Department, a Professor of Mathematics, and Director of Arts and Technology at Smith College. His research is in computational geometry, developing algorithms for geometric computations. He has won several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1987 and the NSF Director's Award for Distinguished Teaching Scholars in 2001. He has published more than 145 papers in journals and conference proceedings, more than 30 of which were coauthored with undergraduates. He has taught folding and unfolding to students in grade school, middle school, high school, college and graduate school, and to teachers - of grade school, middle school, and high school - professors, and researchers. This is his sixth book.

• Part I. Linkages: 1. Robot arms; 2. Straight-line linkages and the pantograph; 3. Protein folding and pop-up cards; Part II. Origami: 4. Flat vertex folds; 5. Fold and one-cut; 6. The shopping bag theorem; Part III. Polyhedra: 7. Durer's problem: edge unfolding; 8. Unfolding orthogonal polyhedra; 9. Folding polygons to convex polyhedra; 10. Further reading; 11. Glossary; 12. Answers to exercises; 13. Permissions and acknowledgments.

'The major theorems presented are remarkable - results that may surprise the reader include the fact that, with the right folds, any shape or collection of shapes (even ones with holes in) … composed of straight lines may be cut out from a sheet of paper with just a single cut.' London Mathematical Society Newsletter