Aaron Pfitzenmaier
I am a high school student who has been doing origami for many years now. I specialize in designing and folding origami consisting of interlocking polyhedral frames, a type of origami pioneered by Daniel Kwan. Each model is made of many units which correspond to an edge on a polyhedron and each unit is folded from a rectangle. The process of making these is rich in geometric concepts and is very interesting. I also use computers to aid in the design and optimization of the polyhedral compounds. I enjoy designing these because it allows me bring together my 3 hobbies of math, computer programming, and origami into a single product which looks neat.
This model was made from 120 units of two different types. I stumbled upon this shape completely by accident while playing around with the ray tracer POV-Ray and decided to fold it because I felt that the double unit effect on the 5-fold axes and the fact that its convex hull is an icosidodecahedron made the shape particularly beautiful. Each frame has tetrahedral symmetry and five them weave together to form an overall model with icosahedral symmetry, similar to the way in which five regular tetrahedra can be combined to form the Tetrahedron 5-compound which has icosahedral symmetry.
This model was made from 180 units of four different types. It consists of 15 irregular hexahedra interlocked together. Each hexahedron has 2-fold dihedral symmetry and the positioning of each hexahedron is based on a pair of opposite edges on an icosahedron. This compound has the most complex weaving pattern out of anything I have designed, and is an example of a model where I extensively used the ray tracer POV-Ray as well as a computer program I wrote to aid in the design and folding/assembly process.