by Margaret Wertheim.

In my Making Space class at the Wide Open School last week, I set the students a challenge: Can we go mathematically wild?

We’d been learning about fractals and I wanted to see if we could build a fractal fantasy. To make our fractals we were using techniques developed by Dr Jeannine Mosely, an MIT trained engineer who invented the field of business card origami. Modern origami practitioners will tolerate just about anything as long as there’s no glue or tape or staples, and in the 1990’s Dr Mosely realized that all those unused business cards in the world could be put to good effect, repurposed to make mathematical sculptures. It was an evolution of the traditional Japanese art of “modular” origami, a beautiful branch of an ancient field whose iterative processes preempt the machinic strands of modernism.

Dr Mosely has developed a repertoire of methods for making…