An origami construction that allows us to trisect an angle, a key functionality needed to construct the cube root of a length and construct a solution to the cube doubling problem.

As a child, I was, for a very long time, quite interested in the art of origami (Japanese paper folding), so much so that I dedicated a good part of my time to learning new techniques and hoarding origami paper. Because of this, I chose to revisit the topic of origami for my MAT 480 Seminar talk.

In my talk I will be discussing the ways that origami can be employed by mathematicians to augment (in some ways) the capabilities of traditional Euclidean geometric constructions (which use a compass and straightedge). I will explore how origami constructions (by way of the “origami number”) form a field closed over the square root operation and I will expand upon this by offering an additional origami construction that makes it possible to calculate the cubed root–an operation that is impossible in standard Euclidean constructions, making it possible to solve the famous cube doubling problem (doubling the volume of a cube through constructions).

The talk will be held on May 5th, 2021 at 3:00pm via the MAT 480 zoom (https://canisius.zoom.us/j/95010785745) and will be available online afterwards at a link announced later.

 

I hope to see you all there!