Dear Roberto...

by Francesco Mancini

I am the lucky owner of a very small part of Roberto Morassi's origami archive. For those who don't
know him, Roberto is the founding father of Centro Diffusione Origami. I have five folders full of
materials he collected during the early days of his passion for origami. In them there are articles,
diagrams, letters on various fields of paper folding and fabric folding. The most interesting part is
surely the mail exchanges with origami luminaries such as Fred Rohm, Sam Randlett or Bob Neale
in the subject area of the mathematics of origami. I'm talking about the 1970s when the CDO wasn't
born yet and, most of all, they didn't have the internet and the email, so the communications were in
pen or typewriter. They didn't have graphic design software so in the envelopes you can find hand-
drawn sequences and step folds of the models.

The first treasure I found is a method to cut out a regular heptagon from a square sheet of paper. It
was discovered in 1975 by Jacques Justin. I like the method because it's quick and easy. You can use
it in order to fold something with this polygon for yourself or you can use it as a teaching aid. The
regular heptagon can offer various didactic ideas: it's a polygon that is not constructible by
Euclidean geometry, some coins have 7 sides, there are cactuses with 7 lobes etc.
You can also talk about the many symbologies of the heptagram (Figure 1). Or you can play a
heptagon scavengers' hunt game with your students.

Figure 1

You can see in the scan of the letter that Justin sent Roberto the diagram and the final shape with a
message on it: "Dear Roberto, do you know the folding of the regular 7-gon. It is based on the very
precise relationship tg2π/7=5/4. Hope all is well for you. Best regards, Jacques."
 Figure 2

I wanted to decode the relationship tg2π/7=5/4 in Justin's note above. 2π/7 is the size of the angle at
the centre of a regular heptagon in radians. I will use degrees, so the internal angle is 360°/7.
If we do some math, tan(360°/7)≈1.254 and 5/4=1.25, so the relationship is precise to the third digit.
But where does the 5/4 come from? I thought about it and I think I found the solution. I'm not a
mathematician so I apologize in advance for being crude. (Thanks to professor Francesco Fumagalli
for the first review).

Figure 3 is the sheet unfolded after step #5, I added an extra construction line to connect M to A by
bringing point D to point O (left). This will form the right triangle MBA. Let the side of the square
be of length 1 unit. We know from folding the length of the short sides: MB=1/2 and BA=5/8
(right).

Figure 3
From Trigonometry we have tangent of angle AMB, we call it x, is equal to the ratio of the opposite
side to the adjacent: So tan(x) = AB/MB = (5/8)/(1/2) = 5/4.

With the reverse operation, the arctangent, we can find the value of x:
x = tan-15/4=51.34°, which is very close to 51.42° the angle at the centre of a regular heptagon.

But in the figure x is not the angle at the centre of the heptagon, MOC. We can easily calculate it.
If we consider the right triangle MCO (the angle MCO is right because, for the Huzita-Justin Axiom
#2, the segment MA is the perpendicular to the segment OC) the angle MOC is equal to:
180° [sum of internal angles of a triangle] -90° [MCO] - (90°-x) [OMC]= 180° -90°-90° + x=x.
So the angle at the centre is equal to 51.34° too. We can say that we have a regular heptagon with a
very good approximation.

Now that you have the heptagon you only need to search for a nice model to fold with it. It's not so
easy to find such a model because not many designers started with a heptagon, the only one who
comes to my mind is Philip Chapman-Bell. But you can look for a model from octagon or a
hexagon and try to transpose to a heptagon. Then there will be a lot of choice from designs by Evan
Zodl, Meenakshi Mukerji, Dasa Severova, Christiane Bettens, Chris Palmer...

Happy folding,
Francesco