Jun Maekawa (前川 淳, Maekawa Jun; 1958-) is a Japanese software engineer, mathematician, and origami artist. He is known…
Jun Maekawa (前川 淳, Maekawa Jun; 1958-) is a Japanese software engineer, mathematician, and origami artist. He is known for popularizing the method of utilizing crease patterns in designing origami models, with his 1985 publication Viva Origami, as well as other paperfolding-related theorems and mathematical analysis. By the late 1980s, he was among the origami designers whose technical advances enabled increasingly complex folded subjects, including creatures and insects with multiple legs and antennae. One of them being Maekawa's theorem in relation to the flat-foldability of origami models. Maekawa currently serves on the committee board of the Japanese Origami Academic Society (JOAS), of which he also served as the committee-chief in the previous years. Outside of extensive research in mathematical-related topics, he also publishes articles on origami-related history and occurrences in the JOAS publications. He is the president of a software firm in Japan, and a member of the Astronomical Society of Japan.
Famous Japanese People: Origami Artist
Origami Artist: 3 people
Kunihiko Kasahara (笠原 邦彦, Kasahara Kunihiko) (born 1941) is a Japanese origami master. He has made more than a hundred…
Kunihiko Kasahara (笠原 邦彦, Kasahara Kunihiko) (born 1941) is a Japanese origami master. He has made more than a hundred origami models, from simple lion masks to complex modular origami, such as a small stellated dodecahedron. He does not specialize in what is known as "super complex origami", but rather he likes making simple, elegant animals, and modular designs such as polyhedra, as well as exploring the mathematics and geometry of origami. A book expressing both approaches is Origami for the Connoisseur (Kasahara and Takahama), which gathers modern innovations in polyhedral construction, featuring moderately difficult but accessible methods for producing the Platonic solids from single sheets, and much more. Kasahara is perhaps origami's most enthusiastic designer and collector of origami models that are variations on a cube, a number of which appear in Vol. 2 of a 2005 three volume work (presently available only in Japanese). Vol. 3 of the same work is devoted to another Kasahara interest: reverse engineering and diagramming classic Japanese origami models pictured in early works, such as zenbazuru (thousand origami cranes from the Hiden Senbazuru Orikata of 1797, one of the earliest known origami books), the origami art of folding multiple connected cranes out of a single sheet of paper. He has written many books, of which Origami Omnibus is his best known book available in English, and contains many of his models as well as outstanding classics by others.
Kosho Uchiyama (内山 興正, Uchiyama Kōshō; 1912 – March 13, 1998) was a Sōtō Zen monk, origami master, and abbot of…
Kosho Uchiyama (内山 興正, Uchiyama Kōshō; 1912 – March 13, 1998) was a Sōtō Zen monk, origami master, and abbot of Antai-ji near Kyoto, Japan. Uchiyama was author of more than twenty books on Zen Buddhism and origami, of which the best known in the Western World are Opening the Hand of Thought: Foundations of Zen Buddhist Practice and How to Cook Your Life: From the Zen Kitchen to Enlightenment.