Infinite folds: Madonna Yoder ’17 is an expert in tessellations
Madonna Yoder ’17 studied rocks at MIT. But her passion is for paper—with no scissors. Today, she’s a tessellation expert who teaches, invents new designs, and writes papers on the underlying math.
When Madonna Yoder ’17 was eight years old, she learned how to fold a square piece of paper over and over and over again. After about 16 folds, she held a bird in her hands.
The first time she pulled the tail of a flapping crane, she says, she realized: Oh, I folded this, and now it’s a toy.
That first piece was an origami classic, folded by kids at summer camp for generations and many people’s first foray into the art form. Often, it’s also the last. But Yoder was transfixed. Soon she was folding everything she could find: paper squares from chain craft shops, scraps from around the house, the weekly church bulletin, which she would cut into pieces with the aid of her fingernails. She would then “turn those into little critters and give them to any guests that were there that week,” she says.
Today, perhaps millions of folds later, Yoder is a superstar known to some as the “Queen of Tessellations,” a reference to a mathematically intricate type of origami that she began exploring during her years at MIT.
Read the rest of Madonna Yoder’s story over at MIT Technology Review.
