More from the MuseumTour expert:
In Japanese, oru means "to fold" and kami means "paper". Japanese origami began in the 6th century when Buddhist monks from China first brought paper to Japan. Kirigami was invented in the United States in the 1960's by a woman named Florence Temko. Origami is not only an intricate art form; it is widely studied by mathematicians. Think about it: from a flat, square sheet of paper, you can create an equilateral triangle, a pentagon, a hexagon, or even the elusive golden and silver rectangles. Some of the long-standing construction puzzles of geometry (such as trisecting an arbitrary angle or doubling the volume of an arbitrary cube), which cannot be completed with a compass and straightedge, can be deftly solve with several folds of paper. Geometry has never been so pretty!