Reconstructing David Huffman’s Origami Tessellations Eli Davis Erik D. Demaine Martin L. Demaine Jennifer Ramseyer MIT CSAIL MIT CSAIL MIT CSAIL MIT CSAIL Cambridge, MA 02139 Cambridge, MA 02139 Cambridge, MA 02139 Cambridge, MA 02139
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] David A. Huffman (1925–1999) is best known in com- ing to the symmetries of one of the 17 periodic “wallpaper puter science for his work in information theory, particu- groups”. Origami historian David Lister [4, 5] attributes the larly Huffman codes, and best known in origami as a pio- origin of origami tessellations to Shuzo Fujimoto, a Japanese neer of curved-crease folding. But during his early paper schoolteacher of mathematics who self-published the first folding in the 1970s, he also designed and folded over a origami tessellation book Twist Origami in 1976. In 1966, hundred different straight-crease origami tessellations. Un- however, artist Ronald Resch patented several origami tes- like most origami tessellations designed in the past twenty sellation designs [6]. Huffman met Resch in 1968, and they years, Huffman’s straight-crease tessellations are mostly talked more extensively at University of Utah in 1973, while three-dimensional, rigidly foldable, and have no locking Huffman was on sabbatical and Resch was a professor there. mechanism. In collaboration with Huffman’s family, our Both Huffman and Resch may have been influenced by these goal is to document all of his designs by reverse-engineering discussions, though we have no clear documentation to this his models into the corresponding crease patterns, or in some effect.