Origami and Math
TheBoostedBrain writes "I found a nice site that explains a little bit about the math in Origami. Origami is one of my favorite hobbies, but I never thought about it being related to science."
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Sometimes you just have to be creative. Math is everywhere.
I wish I would have seen something like this when I was going through school. Geometry was my weakest subject, which made visualizing things in Calc and absolute pain. That in turn hurt me in physics when trying to derive motion calculations.
And all of that together eventually turned me into a Information Systems/Business major, because it didn't require math.
as stated in the article is wrong. Try it - just fold a paper twice in random angles so that the creases meet. The angles will not add up to 180. The author forgot to indicate that n must be odd.
true && more || less
Reminds me of something Richard Feynman said about the term 'computer science' being a misnomer. Science is the study of nature through observation, whereas computers and math are human creations and therefore not natural. They were created by us to do useful things and are quite helpful for placing the natural world in terms that are explict and understandable. However, the laws that these disciplines are built from are, in the end, created by us for their utility. Mathematics is changed and altered by our scientific research, but it is morphed to fit by our doing. The new rules were not 'discovered', but created by necessity. It is like a bridge we design to span a particular space. We cannot 'discover' the bridge because it did not exist before we saw a need for it. Math has no carte blanche. When it does not help us illustrate the natural world it is useless, though pretty, mumbo-jumbo- like numerology.
The difference seems subtle, but it is profound. We cannot blindly take math to be the 'language of god'. It is our language and nothing more or less.
Anyone with me?