6.849 is a semi-annual graduate class at MIT about the mathematics and algorithms underlying all sorts of folding ranging from origami art and design to robotic arms and protein structure. The course follows a textbook, Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra, written by myself and Joseph O'Rourke. Although the content is fairly deep mathematically, the lectures are meant to be accessible to a broader audience to accommodate the several MIT architecture students that often take the class.
This past fall, my father, Martin Demaine, and I video-recorded the lectures, which are available for free streaming. Making these lectures available to the public involved a lot of effort gathering images to which I had the rights (though unfortunately this means that some work cannot be properly represented), in addition to learning how to record high-quality video and audio and learning how to produce web video with synchronized slides and lecture notes.
The result is that anyone can now freely watch high-level lectures about:
- folding any shape
- single-vertex crease patterns
- efficient origami design
- universal hinge patterns and programmable matter
- fold and one cut
- folding motions
- in addition to a variety of topics related to folding objects other than paper.
I hope you enjoy the lectures. Let me know if you have any feedback.
Prof. Erik D. Demaine
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, CSAIL