Building a Mega Menger at MIT

Mega Menger: Building a Menger Sponge at MIT

CURT NEWTON

A Menger Sponge is a three-dimensional fractal curve that has zero volume and infinite surface area. That may be hard to picture, but this MIT News video explains how the Menger Sponge is also an origami project you can make out of folded business cards, and a lot of friends, time, and coordination.

MIT alumna and OrigaMIT origami club member Dr. Jeannine Mosley created one through her Menger Sponge project, and that inspired the club’s contribution to the global Mega Megner collaboration.

You may recall we recently featured origami in Prof. Erik Demaine’s OCW course 6.849 Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra. In his video for Class 5 on “Tessellations & Modulars,” Prof. Demaine describes business card-based modular origami, including the Menger Sponge and Jeannine Mosley’s other work. The video ends with a short lesson on building and working with these cubes.

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