The Business Card Menger Sponge
After 9 years of effort, involving hundreds of folders all over America, the Business Card Menger Sponge was completed. The resulting object is comprised of 66,048 cards folded into 8000 interlinked sub-cubes, with the entire surface paneled to reveal the Level 2 and Level 3 fractal iterations.
On Sunday Sept 10, Dr Mosely will present a lecture on the logical challenge of decomposing this fractal form into manufacturable subunits and on the structural considerations of building such a large object out of business cards.
Dr Jeannine Mosely trained as an electrical engineer at MIT and is a leading practitioner of business card origami. In the emerging field of computational origami, a branch of mathematics that explores the formal properties and potentialities of folded paper, her research focuses on the use of curved creases.
I want to read her "computational business card origami" grant proposal.
Start with this Bob Lang interview.
I have some promising work involving building "twisty things" out of paperclips. I hope to secure funding soon.
Perhaps we can piggyback and get joint funding, then... I've just recently started drawing up grant paperwork re: my "rubber band ball escher knotty thing."
BRILLIANT! We must obtain funding and publish immedietly before someone beats us to the punch.
Are you intrigued? Would you subscribe to her newsletter?
With the number of business cards I have laying around? Certainly!
Seriously, I do think its interesting. Knot theory in 2 dimensions sounds cool, but I'm no geometrist. I probably wouldnt understand it.
After looking at the pic, I read the entire post with the working assumption that "menger" will be how people in the US spell "minger" after its introduction by cool kids like Jamie.
Clearly the pinnacle has been reached. :P
I stumbled upon very outdated pics and info on her very much uncompleted Sponge last year, after poking around for origami ideas for my box of entirely useless business cards. I thought the project was dead, and that seemed a shame, and then thinking harder, it seemed it would be a bigger shame if she actually went through with assembling the huge number of cards in her listed estimates. Now I don't know what to think. It's awesome, and kind of depressing.
As for curved creases, Richard Sweeney has some interesting stuff over on Flickr.
It is awesome, in an OCD kind of way.
That's nifty. I wonder if he uses Lamina to help make those?
my business card origami stuff, in case you didn't find it in your search.
This was quite awhile ago now. I didn't find your stuff (nice), but I did find something to which you link. I reversed a few of those and made them, and they've been sitting on my shelf ever since. Here are a few pics I just took.
nice.
Why do these nebbers always pull their shorts up so damn high?
My brother did a second-order Menger sponge out of regular folding paper. 2,400 pieces and 3 months of work.
...it's not like it's going to get her laid.
"Wanna see my huge sponge?"
Worst pickup line evar.
Hey, some of us find brains attractive, too, you know.
What if she was actually in the sponge at the time...
who wouldn't hit that? Professional sports fans or something?
What a bunch of dullards. A level 3 Menger Sponge is awesome, period.