Robert Lang Origami Insects

[Kaskuser Kiss]

Witheven more lifelike insects than in his first origami-insects book: Origami Insects and their kin, Robert Lang is offering some of the most challenging models ever conceived. Your fingers are going to hurt, but the results are worth it!

Origami insects continue to blow my mind every time I see them. There are tons of different animals and creatures that can be folded with paper but for whatever reason insects always look the most realistic and impressive.

I've been into origami for quite some time now, and I've been teaching it here on Origami.me for over 14 years. My other hobbies include martial arts, travel, video games and Go. I'm also the author of Everyone Can Learn Origami. You should definitely check it out!

Robert James Lang (born May 4, 1961)[citation needed] is an American physicist who is also one of the foremost origami artists and theorists in the world. He is known for his complex and elegant designs, most notably of insects and animals. He has studied the mathematics of origami and used computers to study the theories behind origami. He has made great advances in making real-world applications of origami to engineering problems.

Lang was born in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.[1] Lang studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he met his wife-to-be, Diane.[2] He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1983, and returned to Caltech for a Ph.D. in applied physics, with a dissertation titled Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties.[2][3]

Lang began work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1988.[2] Lang also worked as a research scientist for Spectra Diode Labs of San Jose, California,[4] and then at JDS Uniphase, also of San Jose.[4][5]

Lang has authored or co-authored over 80 publications on semiconductor lasers, optics, and integrated optoelectronics, and holds 46 patents in these fields.[5] In 2001, Lang left the engineering field to be a full-time origami artist and consultant.[4] However, he still maintains ties to his physics background: he was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics from 2007 to 2010, and has done part-time laser consulting for Cypress Semiconductor, among others.[5] Lang currently resides in Altadena, California.[1]

Lang was introduced to origami at the age of six by a teacher who had exhausted other methods of keeping him entertained in the classroom.[2] By his early teens, he was designing original origami patterns.[2] Lang used origami as an escape from the pressures of undergraduate studies. While studying at Caltech, Lang came into contact with other origami masters such as Michael LaFosse, John Montroll, Joseph Wu, and Paul Jackson through the Origami Center of America, now known as OrigamiUSA.[2]

While in Germany for postdoctoral work, Lang and his wife were enamored of Black Forest cuckoo clocks, and he became a sensation in the origami world when he successfully folded one after three months of design and six hours of actual folding.[2]

In 1990, Lang first attempted to write computer code that would solve origami problems, and the result was his first version of Tree Maker.[6] Lang takes full advantage of modern technology in his origami, including using a laser cutter to help score paper for complex folds.[7]

Lang specializes in finding real-world applications for the various theories of origami he has developed. These included designing folding patterns for a German airbag manufacturer.[3] He has worked with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, where a team is developing a powerful space telescope, with a 100 m (328 ft) lens in the form of a thin membrane. Lang was engaged by the team to develop a way to fit the tremendous lens, known as the Eyeglass, into a small rocket in such a way that the lens can be unfolded in space and will not suffer from any permanent marks or creases.[10] Lang is the author or co-author of eight books and many articles on origami.[1] Lang also designed the Google Doodle for Akira Yoshizawa's 101st birthday, which was used by Google on March 14, 2012.[11]

Over a muggy June weekend, more than 600 paper-folding enthusiasts from around the globe are gathered in New York for the annual Origami USA conference. The late-'50s-era classrooms at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Chelsea, where the conference is being held, are a study in beige, from the linoleum to the walls to the dressmakers' mannequins kibitzing in a corner. In one, 20 students ranging in age from 9 to mid-60s wait eagerly, packs of brightly colored paper spread out before them on the long, narrow tables. Their instructor for this course, Robert Lang, notes that the turnout is impressive, considering he didn't provide a sample of the model they'd be folding for the display downstairs in the great hall.

Prior to about the 1980s, origami arthropod designs were thought to be all but impossible. None of the known "bases," intermediate folded forms that might become any of a number of things, could produce both fat bodies and long, spindly appendages. Then came the so-called Bug Wars. Beginning in the 1990s, a handful of origami artists started applying mathematical design techniques developed by Lang and others to create ever more detailed and realistic models: insects with six legs, then eight, then extended wings, then forewings and hindwings, and so on.

People who think of origami as simple paper playthings folded by schoolchildren may be surprised that there's such a thing as a professional origami artist, much less one who's a Caltech- and Stanford-educated engineer and physicist. A decade ago, Lang walked away from a successful career in lasers and optoelectronics to fold paper full time.

The moment he picks up a square of purple paper and begins creasing it in midair, long fingers moving at once with the precision of an engineer and the fluidity of an artist, it's clear he found his calling. Now widely regarded as one of the foremost practitioners of the modern art form, Lang has published more than 500 original origami designs. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Carrousel du Louvre in Paris and the Nippon Museum of Origami in Kaga, Japan, among others. He also pioneered the use of math and computer science to design origami models so complex and intricate that it seems almost inconceivable that they were once a humble square of paper.

When the session ends and classes spill into the hallway, Lang is greeted like a rock star. People ask him to pose for pictures and sign copies of his books and models; he gamely obliges. For the average origami enthusiast, the conference is a chance to meet their idols and fold side by side with them. For Lang, it's an opportunity to pay it forward.

Walking down seven flights of stairs (the elevators are out of service), he talks about his interest in folding as a kid growing up in Georgia in the 1960s. "There was no origami community, no conferences" at the time. When he was in his early teens, Lang got hold of the mailing address for Neal Elias, an insular yet innovative folder who pioneered several techniques, including box pleating. He wrote to Elias and the two started corresponding regularly. Lang says it made him feel connected and inspired him to create his own designs.

Perhaps more significant, Yoshizawa developed a visual language of dashed and dotted lines and arrows for conveying the direction and sequence of folds for his models. This notation system, which has been adopted with a few modifications as the standard worldwide, enabled the exchange of ideas, unhindered by language barriers, and opened the door for the spread of origami to the West.

The past 50 years have seen a dramatic increase not only in the number of unique origami designs, but also in their complexity. Prior to the 1950s, patterns had a maximum of about 30 steps and could be folded in a few minutes, even by a novice. Now, it's not uncommon for a pattern to have hundreds of steps and take several hours for an expert to fold.

What changed, Lang says, was the recognition of the underlying mathematics and application of an algorithmic approach to folding. If you unfold an origami model, you're left with a geometric pattern of crease marks on the paper. People started to figure out that there were mathematical rules that governed how crease patterns related to finished shapes.

Lang was among the first to formalize these ideas and lay them out as a method other people could follow. "People innovating in the '60s and '70s were following mental algorithms that they knew were going to work," he says. "They just couldn't tell you why." The power of these techniques has changed the way people approach origami design from "experimentation guided by intuition" to what Lang cheekily refers to as the "era of intelligent design."

From a young age Lang also loved math, and when he got to college he figured that's what he'd study. But the first "pure math" courses he took as an undergrad at Caltech weren't what he expected. Instead he gravitated toward electrical engineering because he "liked building things." After taking a lab class from one of the inventors of the argon ion laser, he became interested in optics. At the same time, he continued to "push the envelope" with origami, "trying to do things that hadn't been done before or that even seemed like maybe they couldn't be done."

After Stanford he returned to Caltech for a doctorate in applied physics. There he met Diane Davis, and they married shortly after he graduated. She accompanied him to Germany, where he had accepted a postdoc position working on semiconductor lasers. Living in Ludwigsburg, near the famed Black Forest, inspired one of Lang's most recognizable creations: a life-size paper cuckoo clock featuring a deer head with antlers; a bird perched on an extended platform; a face with hour and minute hands; pinecone-shaped weights; and a pendulum. It took three months to design and six hours to fold from a 1-by-10-foot piece of paper. It was the most complex object anyone had ever folded from a single sheet, and it established Lang's reputation in technical origami circles.

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