Kōryō Miura ( ja, 三浦公亮, born 1930) is a Japanese astrophysicist, inventor, and origamist known for the Miura fold. He is a professor emeritus at the University of Tokyo and at the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science.

Miura fold

In the 1970s, Miura began working with Masamori Sakamaki on deployable surfaces, developing what became known as the Miura fold. This is a method of rigidly folding a flat surface, using a

crease pattern A crease pattern is an origami diagram that consists of all or most of the creases in the final model, rendered into one image. This is useful for diagramming complex and super-complex models, where the model is often not simple enough to diagram ...

subdividing the surface into

parallelogram In Euclidean geometry, a parallelogram is a simple (non- self-intersecting) quadrilateral with two pairs of parallel sides. The opposite or facing sides of a parallelogram are of equal length and the opposite angles of a parallelogram are of equa ...

s, so that it fits into a much smaller volume. Miura originally intended this method to be used in spacecraft for deployable membranes such as

solar panel A solar cell panel, solar electric panel, photo-voltaic (PV) module, PV panel or solar panel is an assembly of photovoltaic solar cells mounted in a (usually rectangular) frame, and a neatly organised collection of PV panels is called a photo ...

arrays, but it has since found many other applications including in cartography, surgical devices, flat-foldable furniture, and electrical storage.

Book

With Sergio Pellegrino of Caltech, Miura is the author of the book ''Forms and Concepts for Lightweight Structures'' (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Recognition

Miura was named an honorary member of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) in 2009, "for the invention of Miura-ori and many original developments in the field of space structures". He is also an honorary member of the

International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry The International Symmetry Society ("International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry"; abbreviated name SIS) is an international non-governmental, non-profit organization registered in Hungary (Budapest, Vármegye u. 7. II. 3., H-1 ...

(SIS). His work with Tomohiro Tachi on flexible polyhedra derived from the Miura fold won the 2013 Tsuboi Award of the IASS.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Miura, Koryo 1930 births Living people Japanese mechanical engineers Japanese astrophysicists 20th-century Japanese inventors 21st-century Japanese inventors University of Tokyo faculty