Computational Origami and David Huffman 122
geeber writes "Here is an article about David Huffman's work in the mathematics of computational origami at the New York Times (soul sucking registration required). According to the article, computational origami, "also known as technical folding, or origami sekkei, draws on fields that include computational geometry, number theory, coding theory and linear algebra." David Huffman is also the inventor of Huffman coding used in MP3s and was mentioned prieviously here."
It's great (Score:2, Insightful)
OT: Drop the lame comments (General /. comment) (Score:2, Insightful)
A simple "reg. req." is sufficient.
Origami as an Art (Score:5, Insightful)
Aj
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Mathematical elegance - beauty (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Origami as an Art (Score:3, Insightful)
... used in MP3s? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does everything have to be compared to MP3s? Why couldn't it have been 'Huffman coding used in ZIP files' or '[...] used by GZip' or '[...] used by the huffyuv [google.com] lossless video codec' or any of about 5 million other applications that use huffman coding. Most of which are a lot more specific than MP3 which also uses a cocktail of other techniques to achieve compression and is, above all else, lossy, which huffman coding isn't.
To be transmitted across the Internet, this message was broken down into bits, like MP3s are.
Pure Math strikes again (Score:4, Insightful)
If you're funding education or pure research, you never know when something will unexpectedly prove useful, or even valuable.
If you're the NSA, the RIAA, or any regulator you never know when or where the djinni will get out of the bottle.
(Insert pithy saying about chinese ideograms for danger and opportunity being isomorphic)
What unadulterated load of complete bullshit. (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you know how many hours do dancers practice their physical technoique? Certainly not.
Do you know that many of the most insightful writers will be voraceous readers and will constantly refer to grammar books, dictionaries and other technical resources? It would seem you don't.
Inspiration is frankly overrated, such point of view regarding "inspiration by the muses" so highly is a hangover of the XIX century romantic mentalitly, which of course forgot how the artists of that time worked uncountable hours to polish their technique.