Papers for

mathematics educators

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Formal origami math proofs enable new folding model tools

A Lean Paper About Paper: A Formal Framework for Origami

Abstract: The mathematics of Origami have been well studied and shown to develop several interesting results. We use Lean 4 tactics and build on Mathlib to redefine the 7 Huzita operations as theorems instead of axioms and prove their existence. We develop proofs for important origami constructions (such as trisecting an angle), implement origami-constructible numbers and prove the associated Cardano's formula, and formalize Haga's theorem. A Crease Pattern Inspector explores physical folding by providing a full pipeline to create and visualize models constrained by the Huzita formalism. The Lean codebase brings 100+ theorems and lemmas.

Mon 14 SeptLogic in Computer Science
The gist
Mathematics behind paper folding, known as origami, is quite complex. The authors used a formal proof system called Lean 4 to turn key origami folding rules from assumptions into proven facts. They also created computer code to model and visualize folded paper based on these rules. This work helps confirm the math behind classic origami problems and builds tools to explore folding in a precise way.
Open 2609.14912v1