Miles Wu, 14, has been practicing origami for more than six years.
While most kids can’t even make paper airplanes, Miles Wu folds origami patterns that he believes could one day improve disaster relief (oh, and he even makes money doing it).
Miles Wu Just Won $25,000 for a research project based on an origami fold called A thousand times.
The 14-year-old boy won the top prize in Thermo Fisher Scientific Junior Innovators Challengeorganized by .
Wu spent months determining whether the Miura Fold’s strength-to-weight ratio could be used to improve collapsible structures used in emergency situations.
Essentially, Wu tested how much weight the Miura fold could support on different types of paper, parallelogram heights, parallelogram widths, and parallelogram angles.
Wu said he came up with the idea while learning about natural disasters at school.
“A problem with current collapsible structures and emergency structures is that sometimes the tents are strong, easily collapsible and can pack down very small, but It’s almost never all three things at the same time, but Miura-ori could potentially solve this problem“ said Wu.
“I found that the Miura-ori was really strong, light and folded very compactly”praised the teenager.
Wu tested 54 variations and did 108 rehearsals
As Bisiness Insider explains, when using Miura-ori, a sheet of paper is folded into a smaller area with repeating parallelograms.
To find the winning combination, Wu tested three different parallelogram widths, three different parallelogram angles, and two different parallelogram heights. It also tested three different types of paper. This means that Wu tested 54 hand-folded variations and supervised 108 rehearsals.
Wu gradually placed more weight on each variation until they collapsed. To his surprise, the origami variations were quite strong. He used all the books he had at home as weights before having to ask his parents to buy exercise weights to continue his research.
“The final statistic I got about the strongest Miura-ori I tested was that he could support more than 10,000 times its own weight” said Wu. “This is equivalent to a taxi carrying more than 4,000 elephants“, he added.
