Folding Compact Manifolds and Modern Origami

Hosted by Professor Abdel Salhi. 

Speaker: Professor Tom Hull (Western New England University).

The mathematics of origami has seen a surge of interest over the past decade, in part due to a simultaneous surge in applications of origami in physics and engineering.  Yet in 1976 a British mathematician named Stewart Robertson, motivated by paper folding, performed an extensive study of piecewise-isometric mappings between manifolds of arbitrary dimension [1].  In doing so he discovered some mathematical properties of origami a full decade before they were rediscovered by others.  

In this talk we will survey Robertson's results and extend them to answer the question of whether the canonical local results of 2-dimensional origami, namely Maekawa's and Kawasaki's Theorems, hold in higher dimensions.  [1] S. A. Robertson, Isometric folding of Riemannian manifolds, Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Vol. 79, No. 3-4, 1977-78, 275-284.

• Find out more about Tom's work.