One upside of having all these meeting at work is I can sometimes fold while sitting and listening. Tessellations are very popular in origami these days, although personally I haven’t done much with them. But I was hanging out with Eric Gjerde in San Francisco few weeks ago, and I got intrigued with a couple ideas. Here is a tessellation I came up with that features all pentagons. It doesn’t use pentagonal symmetry however, the underlying grid is square. It’s an ancient pattern used in Moorish and Mideastern art and architecture. But it’s a cool pattern and I a haven’t seen it folded before so I decided to give it try. I actually just sort of started doodling it in a meeting that was dragging on, and it dragged on long enough that I had a fully folded sheet by the end of it. People really responded to it, so I decided to make a better one out a nicer paper.
