49 Fun Facts About Origami

The word origami combines two Japanese words meaning what?

Fold and paper: ori is from oru, 'to fold'; the word once named a folded certificate, and in Edo-period Japan the pastime itself went by other names.

Which molecule did Caltech's Paul Rothemund fold into tiny stars and discs, a method now called origami?

DNA: he showed that one long strand, pinned by some 200 short 'staple' strands, folds itself into flat shapes only about 100 nanometres across.

Origami folders use which Japanese term for designs that involve cutting the paper?

Kirigami: kiri means 'to cut', and the word spread in the West through a best-selling 1960s paper-cutting set by the author Florence Temko.

Which Nintendo hero battles an army of Folded Soldiers in the 2020 game subtitled The Origami King?

Mario: in Paper Mario: The Origami King he teams up with Olivia, sister of the villain King Olly, who has folded Princess Peach into origami and bound her castle in giant streamers.

Folding a thousand paper cranes, senbazuru, is said to grant the folder what?

One wish: the number echoes the thousand years a crane was said to live, and strings of a thousand are now given to the seriously ill as a wish for their recovery.

Sadako Sasaki folded paper cranes in a Hiroshima hospital while fighting which illness, about ten years after the atomic bomb?

Leukaemia: she was two when the bomb fell and fell ill years later, and when paper ran short in hospital she folded cranes from medicine wrappers.

In the best-known telling of Sadako's story, who finished folding her thousand cranes after she died?

Her school friends: the famous children's book has Sadako stopping at 644, but Hiroshima's peace museum says she in fact folded more than 1,300 herself.

Which US president brought paper cranes he had folded himself to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum?

Barack Obama: on his 2016 visit he handed two cranes to local schoolchildren, then left two more beside the message he wrote in the museum's guest book.

Who is considered the grandmaster of modern origami, credited with the standard diagram symbols and inspiring a renaissance of the art?

Akira Yoshizawa: he sold food door to door to get by until a picture magazine commissioned a set of origami zodiac figures from him and made his name.

Origami's grandmaster always refused to do what with his models?

Sell them: he lent his models to exhibitions instead, and by his own 1989 estimate he had created more than 50,000 of them.

Emperor Hirohito awarded the grandmaster of origami which honour in 1983?

The Order of the Rising Sun: he had toured the world for years as a cultural ambassador for Japan, and he died in 2005 on his own 94th birthday.

In standard origami diagrams, what does a plain dashed line indicate?

A valley fold: the paper folds towards you, while dashes broken by dots mark a mountain fold, and the code lets folders follow a book printed in any language.

What is a wet-folded model's advantage over one folded dry?

Gentle curves rather than flat surfaces: water softens the sizing, a glue inside the paper, so a damp sheet can be moulded, and the curves set hard as it dries.

In Blade Runner, which origami figure does the policeman Gaff leave outside Deckard's flat at the very end?

Unicorn: the director's cut shows Deckard daydreaming of one, and Ridley Scott says the silver-paper figure is Gaff's hint that the hero's memories are implants.

Which German educator's kindergarten system carried European paper folding into Japanese schools in the late 1800s?

Friedrich Fröbel: the inventor of the kindergarten graded his paper lessons from playful Folds of Life to Folds of Truth, which taught geometry, and Folds of Beauty.

Which 18th-century luxury replaced castles and beasts folded from starched napkins as the showpiece of Europe's banquet tables?

Porcelain: china figures and centrepieces took over the table, and because a folded napkin is undone the moment it is used, no original sculpture survives in any museum.

The stylised bird known as the pajarita is an early example of paper folding from which country's tradition?

Spain: the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno wrote a playful mock treatise on the little bird, folded his own variants of it and did much to make the pastime popular.

What is the name of Japan's traditional handmade paper, made from the fibres of the paper mulberry?

Washi: tough enough to cover Japan's sliding doors and paper screens as well as books, and the craft of making it by hand is on UNESCO's cultural heritage list.

What Japanese word, which simply means 'paper', do folders use for ordinary packaged origami squares coloured on one side?

Kami: far from an ancient craft paper, it is cheap machine-made stock, coloured on one side, that was first produced for school folding lessons.

Decorative modular folding balls, whose name means "medicine ball", are known as what?

Kusudama: the first ones are thought to have been bunches or bags of fragrant herbs hung in the house, which is why a paper flower ball carries a medicinal name.

Golden Venture folding, which builds showy models from great numbers of small folded units, is named after what?

A ship: the Golden Venture was wrecked off the American coast carrying migrants from China, and the flamboyant paper models they built while held in detention made the style known.

What holds the six folded paper units of a classic Sonobe cube together?

Tucked-in flaps: each unit's flaps slide into pockets on its neighbours and friction does the rest, which keeps modular folding true to origami's rule of no glue.

Pureland origami restricts folders to what?

Simple mountain and valley creases only: John Smith wanted models that beginners and disabled folders could manage, and experts then took up the limit as a puzzle in its own right.

Which landmark's geometric tilework, which had fascinated the artist Escher, inspired Chris Palmer to fold tessellations from one pleated sheet?

The Alhambra: Palmer followed in Escher's footsteps to the Moorish palace in Granada, studied its repeating tile patterns and became a leading folder of tessellations.

An entomologist's paper insects grew into the yearly origami holiday tree at which New York institution?

American Museum of Natural History: Alice Gray of its insect department began by hanging a small tree with folded insects, and the museum now unveils a large tree of folded models every winter.

In Tom Angleberger's 2010 children's novel, a sixth-grader wears an origami finger puppet of which Star Wars character?

Yoda: in The Strange Case of Origami Yoda the puppet dispenses advice from the finger of the class oddball Dwight, and his classmate Tommy compiles a case file to decide whether to trust it.

The rigid Miura fold has been used to deploy what from a folded position in space?

Solar panel arrays: the Japanese space scientist Koryo Miura's pleat opens in one motion when its ends are pulled, so an array needs fewer motors, and the same fold lets a map open with a single pull.

Origami principles have been applied to the deployment of which two medical and automotive devices?

Both must unfold from a compact form reliably.

Paper folding can solve which two classical problems that are impossible with compass and straightedge?

Angle trisection and doubling the cube: a single fold can place two points onto two lines at once, which solves cubic equations, while compass and straightedge stop at quadratics.

By Maekawa's theorem, the creases meeting at any point inside a model that folds flat must always number what?

An even number: Jun Maekawa showed that the mountain folds and valley folds at such a point always differ by exactly two, so however many there are, their total cannot be odd.

Kawasaki's theorem says the creases meeting at a point fold flat only if what adds up to 180 degrees?

Every other angle: fold a sheet in half twice and the four right angles at the centre obey the rule, since each alternate pair makes 180 degrees, while a point that breaks it cannot be pressed flat.

Robert Harbin, the first president of the British Origami Society, earned his living on stage as what?

Magician: Harbin invented the Zig Zag Girl, in which the centre section of the box holding his assistant is taken clean away, and his 1956 book Paper Magic hastened the rise of modern origami.

Which physicist turned origami artist, once of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, wrote the design program TreeMaker?

Robert J. Lang: he left laser physics in 2001 to fold paper full time, and his program turns a stick figure of the flaps a model needs into a crease pattern.

Designers of complex origami insects decide where each leg and antenna will sit on the square using what method?

Circle packing: each leg or antenna claims a circle of paper, and fitting those circles onto the square produced the many-limbed insects that folders tried to outdo one another with in the 1990s 'Bug Wars'.

Which MIT professor, who entered university at 12, helped prove that any straight-sided shape can be made with folds and one cut?

Erik Demaine: he won a MacArthur 'genius grant' at 22, and he still makes folded-paper sculpture with his father Martin, who home-schooled him until university.

In legend, Betsy Ross folded a sheet and made one snip to talk George Washington out of what?

Six-pointed stars: the tale has her fold a sheet, snip once and open out a perfect five-pointed star, showing Washington's committee how easily her version could be made.

A California high-school student folded paper in half twelve times, beating a supposed limit of eight, by using what?

An extremely long strip: Britney Gallivan worked out that each extra fold needs roughly four times as much paper rather than twice, so the length required soon runs away.

The playground paper fortune teller is also known in the US by what name?

Cootie catcher: 'cootie' was First World War soldiers' slang for a body louse, and children are said to snap the folded paper like pincers to play at catching them.

The classic origami flapping bird beats its wings when you pull what?

Its tail: a tug makes the wings beat, and it was this bird, folded for her by a relative, that drew Lillian Oppenheimer back to paper folding before she popularised origami across the United States.

The origami documentary Between the Folds, shown on the PBS series Independent Lens, won which honour?

A Peabody: the prize honours broadcasting, and Vanessa Gould's film follows artists and scientists who gave up conventional careers to fold paper.

Japan's Tomoko Fuse, a leading designer of modular origami, is best known for which lidded objects?

Boxes: she builds her modular ones, lid and all, from identical folded sheets, in shapes that run from triangular and pentagonal to hexagonal and octagonal.

A noshi, the folded paper token on a Japanese gift, was designed to hold a dried strip of which prized shellfish?

Abalone: the stretched strip was a token of good fortune, but today a slip of yellow paper usually stands in for it, or the whole noshi is simply printed on the wrapping.

Folded paper was put to early religious use at Japan's Shinto shrines as what?

Ceremonial decorations such as gohei: a Shinto priest still waves a wand hung with such zigzag paper streamers over worshippers to purify them.

At a traditional Japanese wedding, the sake vessels carry a folded paper pair, one male and one female, of which creatures?

Butterflies: samurai houses such as the Ogasawara and Ise handed the fold down as part of their formal etiquette, and a Japanese poem of 1680 already mentions folded butterflies.

The company Oru uses the principles of origami to fold which full-size craft from a single sheet?

Kayak: when the paddling is over, the boat's single creased sheet folds in on itself to become its own carrying case.

In the animated film Kubo and the Two Strings, the young hero brings his origami figures to life by doing what?

Playing his shamisen: the one-eyed boy earns his living in the village by playing the Japanese stringed instrument while his paper figures act out heroic tales.

The Foldscope, folded origami-style from a single sheet of paper and costing under a dollar to make, is a working what?

Microscope: the Stanford bioengineer Manu Prakash designed it so that clinics and classrooms with little money could still afford an instrument of their own.

Which small origami model is wound from a long, thin strip of paper and then pinched until it puffs up?

The Lucky Star: one end of the strip is looped into a flat pentagon, the rest is wound round it, and pushing in each side makes the little star puff up, which is also known as a wishing star.

Which hand tool is used to make sharp creases easily?

Paper clips can serve as extra fingers and tweezers help with tiny folds; some purists use no tools at all.