The motto of MIT is mens et manus, which is mind and hand.

So it's not just about thinking about things and solving problems in your head, but it's also about physically doing things.

My dad and I started getting interested in art and craft because we were trying to solve math problems.

We'd work on a problem, get stuck and then build something that helped explain it.

Computational origami is quite useful for the problems we were trying to solve.

As we made more and more models to understand what was going on geometrically at some point those models started looking beautiful.

Now, we try to integrate the math and sculpture making together.

The more we do it, the more we view them through the same lens.

At least, I like to think about art also as a problem solving endeavor.

I'm a theoretical computer scientist, and usually we're trying to understand what problems are easy for computers to solve, versus which ones are hard for computers to solve.

But I got interested in folding just because it seemed interesting, mathematically.

I was curious about becoming a lawyer.

I went to law school for a term and decided I definitely did not want to be a lawyer.

So I headed to northern New Brunswick, Canada and I built a log cabin.

It made me not afraid to try anything.

I homeschooled my son.

I became a single parent before he was three.

What I decided about learning is that it's not what you learn it's to become excited about learning.

I think our first collaboration was the Erik and Dad Puzzle Company when I was five and six years old.

We made and sold wire take-apart puzzles to toy stores across Canada.

I helped design the puzzles; Marty made them all.

And then we split the money 50-50, which was pretty cool as a six year old.

In the beginning, Erik wasn't interested in math, so there was no pressure to do math.

I was playing lots of Nintendo.

I asked my dad, how do people make video games?

And a neighbor had one of the early personal computers.

We borrowed it and made a video game.

I took advanced calculus and then I really saw the beauty in mathematics.

You have this ultimate truth.

You can prove that some theorem is true and know for sure that that is true.

I think there's no other aspect of human existence where you have that kind of certainty.

What was it like to be a 12-year-old in college?

It was great.

My peers, of course, were much older than me.

They treated me like any other student.

They invited me to parties.

They tried to keep the drugs in another room, I'm told but I didn't know that was happening.

But I ended up doing undergrad in two years.

And then it's like, well, I want to learn more stuff.

So I guess grad school?

And I saw this world of origami mathematics that seemed really cool.

Finished my PhD when I was 20 and was lucky enough to get a job offer at MIT.

The unusual thing is that when Erik was offered a job, t hey also offered me one because we had a reputation for working together.

Well, that's not bad.

That's a good test.

Erik and I have published 100 joint papers.

Interesting.

The most important problem now is to prove that, mathematically these curved forms exist.

We use a ball burnisher to put indentations into the paper.

When we first started folding paper, we used a laser cutter and then we decided everything had to be handmade, every step.

The paper wants to fold along the score lines but we have to really encourage it to go around all the creases.

And as we do that, the paper just pops into this 3D form.

Nice.

It's a very simple constraint in origami that you're not allowed to stretch or tear the paper.

And so all you're allowed to do is deform it by folds.

It makes it a little bit harder.

It makes it a lot harder, to be honest.

Oh, you're doing a better job than I am.

When we started working in computational origami I think part of the appeal was that it seemed useless.

But years later, it turned out that if you want to build a structure that can change its shape folding is a pretty natural way to do that.

Like, if you want to make a giant telescope lens in space you first need to fold it up into something small so you can put it in a shuttle to go into space where it can then unfold.

So origami is actually super useful for engineering and medicine and things like that.

Let's go up, maybe... Yeah.

My dad and I had been trying to understand the mathematics and explain how paper behaves in curved crease folding.

And we were starting to realize hey, the geometry is cool.

Let's try to make them even more beautiful.

Yeah, I kind of like it.

Around that time, MoMA contacted us and said hey, we're doing this show.

It's about science and art.

Got any cool objects?

That was quite a surprise.

And so it ended up in their permanent collection.

I guess rarely does an art career start with MoMA.

And soon after, various galleries would say hey, we're doing a show about paper are you interested?

Hey, we're doing a show about book art do you have some pieces?

And so that became, let's make more and more sculpture and explore that deeper and deeper.

Now this main idea is we're threading a string or a few strings through a series of disconnected components.

Such that when you pull the string tight now this is like a pretty stable structure.

You can, like...

I think I tend to attract the students who are also interested in building physical manifestations of their work.

That means there's two strings going through that tube, so you...

It's not always easy to do that in mathematics.

Exactly, yeah.

But I think it enriches the whole experience.

Yeah.

So, the shape of the pieces might affect it.

I think... A couple of years after being at MIT I get this phone call from the MacArthur Foundation and they're like, you've won this award.

The MacArthur Fellowship exists to say that's cool that you're working on things that other people don't explore.

That confirmation for me sort of encouraged me to go even more in that direction and explore the more obscure things and whatever I found exciting was okay.

As an artist in the '60s, I tried different things.

And then I saw a glass in a school in England.

I spent nine months there and then returned to my log cabin and started a studio there to make art glass.

I had never seen my dad blow glass before.

It was all before I was born.

Lighter air.

At MIT, we just jumped back into glassblowing and then I got to learn to blow glass so we could play in that space together.

We've evolved blowing these hollow forms and then the idea was, you can't just have a plain glass vessel.

And one of the techniques is almost randomly putting hot glass over the glass.

And that produces an optic effect that distorts what you see inside.

We wanted to combine these two interests that we have of blowing glass and paper sculpture.

Those are two materials that generally aren't thought of belonging together.

This is the complete works of Shakespeare but only the words that have "red" in them.

I see Frederick, labored, favoredly all of these have red highlighted in the middle.

Here's a folded one, and we're going to embed this paper inside the blown glass vessel.

One in.

Yeah.

Sculpture, I guess, is not a normal activity as an MIT professor in computer science.

Oh, that's nice.

Staying coiled like that.

Whoa, that's awesome!

But I think for us, it's really a benefit to have two careers instead of one.

Doing art, we inspire new mathematics and doing mathematics, we inspire new art.