Origami: Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha

Logos

I made these models as a gift for my geeky husband. Turns out these are great home
decoration and cat toys! If you are interested in geeky home decoration or killing some time
in a geeky way, try make your own origami logos follow the instruction below.

What's in the logo?

This blog post from WolframAlpha blog explained what the logos are in geometry. The
origami models are made using unit origami method, that is making simple units and
assemble them together to form a certain shape. Understanding the constituents of the logos
might make the assembling easier.

Spikey
Mathematica logo v1 (Spikey) "consisted of the spiked solid obtained from an icosahedron
(the regular 20-faced solid that is one of the five Platonic solids) with regular tetrahedra
(triangular pyramids) affixed to its faces." Spikey has 60 equilateral triangular faces. Our
basic unit contains two equilateral triangles, which means we need to make 30 units.

Wolfram|Alpha
The logo is a rhombic hexecontahedron (rhombic refers to the fact that the faces of the solid
consist of rhombi, while hexecontahedron is a word derived from the Greek, which simply
means 60-faced solid). The shape of the faces is called golden rhombus, which is very hard
to construct in origami. Luckily this rhombus has an approximately 60 degree angle. I decided
to use the same unit as Spikey. It needs 60 units to construct the Wolfram|Alpha logo.

You will need

Origami paper: 30 pieces for Spikey and 60 pieces for Wolfram Alpha. If you use
7.5cm paper for Spikey or 5cm paper for Wolfram Alpha, your final work will be
around 9cm in diameter.

Knife: To cut paper in certain size.

Glue: In fact you dont need anything like glue at all to finish the work. Just in case
you want your model more stable and longer-lasting.

Tips

Don't use thick paper for the work, as the folding gets very complicated in the end.

If you decided not to use any glue, don't use slippery paper. It will drive you crazy!

The folding gets easier when you use larger paper, but the assembling will be looser
and harder to make last.

Using professional origami paper will save you a lot of cutting effort.

Basic Unit Folding Instruction

Step 0
Get your paper ready, colored side down. Fold the right part left to make the paper in half.
Crease and open. Youll see a lot of steps just like this: Crease and open. It seems like an
undo operation to what youve just done but these steps are definitely not useless. Origami
needs geometry to fold certain shapes. Usually it uses creases as a reference to the following
steps.

Step 1

Using the bottom-left corner as a pivot, fold the bottom-right corner up. Make it land on the
crease made in Step 0. Crease and open. You may find our first 60 angle in the shape. Do the
same folding on the opposite side.

Step 2
Now we have three creases intersecting in a single point. Fold bottom-left and bottom-right
corners to the intersection. Crease and open. Two new intersections appeared on the bottom of
the square. Fold the left and right edge to the center, make the corners land on the new
intersections. For the first time, we dont need to open the folding. The width of the current
shape is the length of the longer diagonal of our final rhombus.

Step 3
Find the intersection of the right edge and the crease made in Step 1. Using the intersection as
a pivot, fold the top-right corner down so that the edge is aligned with the crease marked in
the picture. Crease and open. Fold the opposite side down in the same way, but dont unfold
this time. Fold the triangle upward.

Step 4
Pinch the top layer and pull out. Fold the bottom-right up using the crease made in Step 1. Do
it again in the opposite direction: Fold the triangle down, pinch the top layer and pull out.

Step 5
Fold the right part to the left. Crease and open. The following movement is a little bit hard to
describe. We need to pinch the marked point, pull to the left, using the center line crease. The
animated graphic below might be easier to follow. Fold the triangle upward.

Step 6

Fold the shaded triangle inward, insert it under the layer below. Repeat Step 5-6 in the
opposite direction: Pull the left part to the right, fold the triangle down and fold the shaded
part inward.

Step 7
Insert the marked parts one layer down. And its done! Turn over and youll see a perfect
rhombus with a 60 angle.

Assembly Method
Spikey (1.5h to finish)
Step 0
Get your 30 units ready. Before we start, we need to know how to assemble two units. Find
two pockets and two joints on the unit. Fold the unit in half, and fold both joints forward as
shown in the picture. When assembling, insert one joint of the unit into one pocket of the
other unit until it reaches the end.

Step 1
Assemble your first 5 units. You may follow the color I used in the picture, if you wish to
have a similar colored model. Our final model will have a lot (twelve) of this star-liked
component.

Step 2
Attach 5 more units to the existing model. Join each new unit with two existing units on the 5unit-structure to form a spike. We will construct twenty spikes on our final model. These 5
units added in this step are our second layer. Now we have 10 assembled units.

Step 3
We need 10 units on our third layer. Insert two units between each two units on Layer 2. Since
there are 5 units on Layer 2, we will need 10 units for Layer 3. Observe the model, you will
find two kinds of vertexes. The concave ones should have five units around, forming a starliked structure, while the convex ones have three units forming a spike.

Step 4
Turn the model over, connect each two adjacent units on Layer 3 to form a spike. Assemble 5
new units to Layer 3 to form 5 more spikes.

Step 5
Assemble 5 last units on the top layer to form a star-liked-structure. The final insertion might
get difficult, you can fold the joint in half to make it shorter. Dont worry, the final model will
still be steady enough.

Wolfram|Alpha (2.5h to finish)

Step 0
Wolfram|Alpha logo is a rhombic hexecontahedron, that means each face is a rhombus. The
insertion of the units are slightly different. We dont need to fold the unit in half, just insert the
joint into the pocket of another unit. Prepare 60 red units. You may insert every 5 units
together to make counting easier.

Step 1
Use 5 units to form a star. Make 12 stars using all 60 units. Connect two stars together,
every two stars have two connected vertices.

Step 2
Follow the rule of each two stars have two connected vertices, assemble the stars. Every 6
stars can form a hemisphere. Connect two hemispheres together. And its done!