Tomohiro Tachi ( ja, 舘知宏, born 1982) is a Japanese academic who studies

origami ) is the Japanese art of paper folding. In modern usage, the word "origami" is often used as an inclusive term for all folding practices, regardless of their culture of origin. The goal is to transform a flat square sheet of paper into a f ...

from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining approaches from the

mathematics of paper folding The discipline of origami or paper folding has received a considerable amount of mathematical study. Fields of interest include a given paper model's flat-foldability (whether the model can be flattened without damaging it), and the use of paper f ...

structural rigidity In discrete geometry and mechanics, structural rigidity is a combinatorial theory for predicting the flexibility of ensembles formed by rigid bodies connected by flexible linkages or hinges. Definitions Rigidity is the property of a struct ...

, computational geometry,

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and constructing building ...

, and materials science. His work was profiled in "The Origami Revolution" (2017), part of the '' Nova'' series of US science documentaries. He is a professor at the

University of Tokyo , abbreviated as or UTokyo, is a public research university located in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Established in 1877, the university was the first Imperial University and is currently a Top Type university of the Top Global University Project b ...

Education and career

Tachi studied engineering and architecture at the University of Tokyo, earning bachelor's and master's degrees in 2005 and 2007 respectively, and completing his Ph.D. in 2010. He became an assistant professor in the Department of General Systems Studies at the University of Tokyo in 2010, and became an associate professor in 2018, adding at the same time affiliations with the Department of Information and Graphic Sciences and Department of Architecture.

Contributions

Tachi has been called a "renowned origami artist", and "one of the world experts on

rigid origami Rigid origami is a branch of origami which is concerned with folding structures using flat rigid sheets joined by hinges. That is, unlike in traditional origami, the panels of the paper cannot be bent during the folding process; they must remain ...

. His artworks include a "calculated and precise"

nudibranch Nudibranchs () are a group of soft-bodied marine gastropod molluscs which shed their shells after their larval stage. They are noted for their often extraordinary colours and striking forms, and they have been given colourful nicknames to match, ...

, folded from mirror-finished metal, and an origami version of the

Utah teapot The Utah teapot, or the Newell teapot, is a 3D test model that has become a standard reference object and an in-joke within the computer graphics community. It is a mathematical model of an ordinary Melitta-brand teapot that appears solid w ...

, exhibited at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art in Israel. With

Erik Demaine Erik D. Demaine (born February 28, 1981) is a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy. Early life and education Demaine was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to artist sculptor Marti ...

, he has developed software that can automatically transform any three-dimensional object, represented as a

polygon mesh In 3D computer graphics and solid modeling, a polygon mesh is a collection of , s and s that defines the shape of a polyhedral object. The faces usually consist of triangles ( triangle mesh), quadrilaterals (quads), or other simple convex p ...

, into an origami model of the object. His research also includes generalized versions of the

Miura fold The is a method of folding a flat surface such as a sheet of paper into a smaller area. The fold is named for its inventor, Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura. The crease patterns of the Miura fold form a tessellation of the surface by ...

that can be used to model any smooth surface, and bistable hyperbolic paraboloid structures formed from nested square origami folds. With Hiroya Tanaka, he is the author of the 2020 Japanese-language book コンピュテーショナル・ファブリケーション 'Computational Fabrication: Design and Science of Origami and Tessellation''

Recognition

In 2009, Tachi won the Hangai Prize of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), for his work on quadrilateral mesh origami. His work with Kōryō Miura on

flexible polyhedra In geometry, a flexible polyhedron is a polyhedral surface without any boundary edges, whose shape can be continuously changed while keeping the shapes of all of its faces unchanged. The Cauchy rigidity theorem shows that in dimension 3 such ...

derived from the Miura fold won the 2013 Tsuboi Award award of the IASS. He was the recipient of the 2016 A. T. Yang Memorial Award in Theoretical Kinematics of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, with Tom Hull, for their joint work on predicting the motion of

patterns when forces are applied to them in their flat state. Together with his coauthors Evgueni T. Filipov and Glaucio H. Paulino, Tachi won the 2020 Cozzarelli Prize in Engineering and Applied Sciences for their work using the Miura fold to generate stiff but reconfigurable tubular structures.

References

External links

Home page
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Origami models by Dr. Tomohiro Tachi
Google Arts & Culture
What I am thinking: origami artist and mathematician Tomohiro Tachi
interview with Tachi originally published in the proceedings of IASS 2018 {{DEFAULTSORT:Tachi, Tomohiro 1982 births Living people Origami artists Japanese mechanical engineers 21st-century Japanese architects 21st-century Japanese mathematicians Researchers in geometric algorithms University of Tokyo alumni Academic staff of the University of Tokyo