Robert Lang's tome Origami Design Secrets was my first non school related introduction into mathematics. I remember looking in awe at the equations in the back of the book, then I started taking math courses ... For awhile there I was almost able to follow what he was talking about, now 8 years out of uni, I can once again look in the back of that book in awe.
Although it's not origami, Pepakura Designer is another popular piece of software for creating 3D paper models.<p><a href="http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/" rel="nofollow">http://www.tamasoft.co.jp/pepakura-en/</a>
I think that's what Erik Demaine mentioned in his folding class.<p>Link: <a href="http://erikdemaine.org/folding/" rel="nofollow">http://erikdemaine.org/folding/</a> ; <a href="http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.849/fall10/lectures/" rel="nofollow">http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.849/fall10/lectures/</a>
Really interesting. The Linux port is not maintained, unfortunately (last worked on ubuntu 10.04, apparently - someone made a docker environment here: <a href="https://github.com/AndrewKvalheim/treemaker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/AndrewKvalheim/treemaker</a> but the base image is so old it is not on docker hub any more.
I love this quote from the book "Origami Design Secrets":<p><pre><code> If you are a beginning designer, you should realize that no design is sacred. To learn to design, you must disregard reverence for another’s model, and be willing to pull it apart, fold it differently, change it and see the effects of your changes.
Small ideas lead to big ideas; the concepts of design build upon one another.</code></pre>
Without getting into the mathematics, can somebody point me to a decent website that can teach me origami from basics? When I google, I get sent to a bunch of sites that are often not well designed to teach.