Kōryō Miura (, born 1930) is a Japanese astrophysicist, inventor, and

origami ) is the Japanese art of paper folding. In modern usage, the word "origami" is often used as an inclusive term for all folding practices, regardless of their culture of origin. The goal is to transform a flat square sheet of paper into a ...

st known for the

Miura fold The is a method of folding a flat surface such as a sheet of paper into a smaller area. The fold is named for its inventor, Japanese astrophysicist Kōryō Miura. The crease patterns of the Miura fold form a tessellation of the surface by pa ...

. He is a

professor emeritus ''Emeritus/Emerita'' () is an honorary title granted to someone who retirement, retires from a position of distinction, most commonly an academic faculty position, but is allowed to continue using the previous title, as in "professor emeritus". ...

at the

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

and at the

Institute of Space and Astronautical Science , or ISAS, is a Japanese national research organization of astrophysics using rockets, astronomical satellites and interplanetary probes which played a major role in Japan's space development. Established as part of the University of Tokyo ...

Miura fold

In the 1970s, Miura began working with Masamori Sakamaki on deployable surfaces, developing what became known as the

. This is a method of rigidly folding a flat surface, using a crease pattern subdividing the surface into

parallelogram In Euclidean geometry, a parallelogram is a simple polygon, simple (non-list of self-intersecting polygons, self-intersecting) quadrilateral with two pairs of Parallel (geometry), parallel sides. The opposite or facing sides of a parallelogram a ...

s, so that it fits into a much smaller volume. Miura originally intended this method to be used in

spacecraft A spacecraft is a vehicle that is designed spaceflight, to fly and operate in outer space. Spacecraft are used for a variety of purposes, including Telecommunications, communications, Earth observation satellite, Earth observation, Weather s ...

for deployable membranes such as

solar panel A solar panel is a device that converts sunlight into electricity by using photovoltaic (PV) cells. PV cells are made of materials that produce excited electrons when exposed to light. These electrons flow through a circuit and produce direct ...

arrays, but it has since found many other applications including in cartography, surgical devices, flat-foldable furniture, and electrical storage.

Book

With Sergio Pellegrino of Caltech, Miura is the author of the book ''Forms and Concepts for Lightweight Structures'' (Cambridge University Press, 2020).

Recognition

Miura was named an honorary member of the International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS) in 2009, "for the invention of Miura-ori and many original developments in the field of space structures". He is also an honorary member of the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry (SIS). His work with Tomohiro Tachi on

flexible polyhedra In geometry, a flexible polyhedron is a polyhedral surface without any boundary edges, whose shape can be continuously changed while keeping the shapes of all of its faces unchanged. The Cauchy rigidity theorem shows that in dimension 3 such ...

derived from the Miura fold won the 2013 Tsuboi Award of the IASS.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Miura, Koryo 1930 births Living people Japanese mechanical engineers Japanese astrophysicists 20th-century Japanese inventors 21st-century Japanese inventors Academic staff of the University of Tokyo