Nature has always inspired Robert Lang’s designs, such as this origami hawk. Three more of his creations are seen on this page.

Trains, trees, boats, bees. IEEE Member Robert Lang can make just about anything out of paper. The 46-year-old physicist turned artist has designed and folded some of the most difficult origami in the world. And he’s developed software that figures out folding patterns for all sorts of animals, plants, and objects.

 “Origami” is the Japanese name for the art of folding one sheet of paper into objects, usually without cutting. Paper cranes are perhaps the most familiar examples of the pastime. But Lang’s creations have taken the art to the next level, breaking the boundaries with designs once thought too difficult to make. He has become well known for his intricate work—especially for his collection of insects and arthropods, including all sorts of spiders and winged bugs. “I believe anything can be represented in origami,” he says.

His creations have even left the world of paper and made their way into cars, outer space, and medical devices. Lang worked with an automotive software company to design the folding pattern needed to make air bags fold efficiently. And he designed a folding lens for a space telescope. Because a large flat lens can’t be blasted into space, it had to be folded, inserted into a rocket, and unfolded once the telescope was in orbit. He also designed the folding pattern for a medical implant that unfolds in the body and wraps around the heart, preventing it from swelling. The implant is used in patients with congestive heart failure.

Lang is surprised at the variety of ways origami is used. “When I started out I made little paper animals,” he says. “The enormous range of real-world applications is amazing."

”The media has caught on to Lang. The New Yorker ran a profile of him in February, and he was interviewed in May on the CBS News “Sunday Morning” TV show. The publicity has garnered him new clients, including private art collectors, advertising agencies that want to use his designs in their commercials, and companies interested in the use of folding in industrial design.

Although Lang’s path to becoming an origami master was unconventional, his interest in the art began with a basic how-to book.

When he was 6 years old and living in Atlanta, a teacher gave him an introductory book that had four origami figures. “I made those designs over and over again, and my parents bought me more books when they saw how interested I was,” he recalls. Eventually he wanted to create designs of his own.

“I wanted to make an eagle, so I decided to design it myself,” he says of an early creation. By his teens, making his own designs came naturally.

MATH MEETS ORIGAMI Math also fascinated Lang. “I went to college thinking I’d study math, but then I got hooked on electronics because I could build real objects and make them do things,” he says. “With origami I made things out of paper, with electronics it was chips and wire.” He later became interested in lasers and photonics.

Lang earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1982 from Caltech, a master’s in electrical engineering the next year from Stanford, and a doctorate in applied physics in 1986 from Caltech. In 1988 he became a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, Calif.

But he continued with origami. In 1990 he began writing software he called TreeMaker, which computes folding patterns for designs. “You draw a stick figure of the shape you want and enter the length of the limbs and the topology of how they’re connected,” Lang explains. The program then plots the coordinates for the crease pattern for a shape that has the same structure as the stick figure. A few years later he created Reference Finder, a program that takes coordinates from TreeMaker and generates the order of steps for folding the points and lines in the pattern. Both programs were the first of their kind.

 In 1992 he joined the fiber optics company SDL, in Silicon Valley, as a manager and later vice president of research and development. In his spare time, he also wrote six origami books. His first, Origami Insects and Their Kin [Dover, 1988], has instructions for various objects and animals, including the insects that are Lang’s specialty and are considered particularly challenging because of their many narrow appendages.

FULL-TIME FOLDER Lang enjoyed his physics job, but he had plans to write another book, one that would teach people how to design their own origami. In 2001 he quit his job to devote himself to his art. Origami Design Secrets (AK Peters) came out in 2003.

Lang hasn’t completely dropped science and technology. He’s been active in the IEEE Lasers & Electro-Optics Society for years and recently became editor in chief of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics. He’s also a consultant for various optoelectronics companies.

Now he’s writing a book that details the connection between origami and math, science, and technology. Lang also continues to invent new origami designs, because that’s what makes him tick. “There are things I don’t know how to do yet, and that’s what drives me to keep pushing the art of origami forward,” he says.