Miles Wu

Or even a super long CVS receipt.

into a centipede, or even The New York Times into a lizard.

And it's this process of turning nothing into something that sparks my imagination and draws me to origami.

I've also found that origami has the power to help others.

During the pandemic, eight-year-old me wrote cards and mailed origami birds to seniors at my local nursing home to cheer them up during quarantine.

And more recently, I've been folding even more origami birds.

Two years ago, I folded some origami pigeons.

By some, I mean 200 of them.

If you couldn't tell, pigeons are my favorite birds.

And then the following year, I folded sparrows, another bird that's overlooked but that I personally love.

And I folded 100 of them and sold them alongside the pigeons to raise over $4,000 to donate to my local soup kitchen, as well as a nonprofit that rehabilitates injured and orphaned birds in New York City.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks.

And so through this project, I was able to see the power of the most humble material, a simple piece of paper, to really help my community.

More recently, I've been interested in the intersection of origami and science and engineering.

I think it started in middle school when I began going down rabbit holes to see how scientists and researchers and engineers were using origami folds.

for example, in space, or even to help sick people.

But one fold interested me in particular, and this was the Mira Ori fold.

It was invented in the 1970s by Koryo Mira, a Japanese astrophysicist.

It's a tessellation, which means it's a repeating pattern of parallelograms.