Origami and Partial Differential Equations

Abstract. Origami is the ancient Japanese art of folding paper. Even if origami is mainly an artistic product, it has received a great deal of attention from mathematicians, because of its interesting algebraic and geometrical properties. We present a new mathematical model of origami which has a double purpose. In one hand we give an analytical approach which provides a new perspective to the existing algebraic and geometrical models. In the other hand we use origami as a tool to exhibit explicit solutions to some systems of partial differential equations.