Mathematica: great for Origami
November 09, 2018
Mathematica: great for Origami
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Wolfram Mathematica
I use Mathematica as my "Swiss army knife" of analysis, design, and modeling of origami-related structures and mechanisms. It allows me to model origami problems at varying levels of idealization, ranging from simple 2-D polygonal models, to 3-D shapes with thickness, stress/strain relationships, and analytic descriptions of curved folding.
Pros
- It allows straightforward integration of analytic analysis of algebraic expressions and their numerical implemented.
- Supports varying programmatic paradigms, so one can choose what best fits the problem or task: pure functions, procedural programming, list processing, and even (with a bit of setup) object-oriented programming.
- The extensive and rich tools for graphical rendering make it very easy to not just get 2D and 3D renderings of final output, but also to do quick-and-dirty 2D and 3D rendering of intermediate results and/or debugging results.
Cons
- It is, unfortunately, quite slow compared to, say, C code implementation of numerical routines. (However, getting a routine up and running is still vastly faster in Mathematica, so the tradeoff is worth it.)
- New functionality is sometimes not implemented as fully as it could be: MeshRegions are still fairly limited.
- The underlying core doesn't work equally well across platforms: things that run fine on Mac crash on Windows.
- It lets me solve many of the origami-related problems that I've taken on.
The ability to manipulate algebraic expressions, nested lists, and data structures in Mathematica was unequalled when I first did the comparison. Since then, I've stuck with Mathematica mostly because it's "the tool I know."
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