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The geometry of folding paper dolls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2016

Brigitte Servatius
Brigitte Servatius*
Affiliation:
Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester MA 01609, USA
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Extract

When a parent sees a little girl sitting on the floor cutting paper dolls, many thoughts may come to mind: ‘She’s keeping out of trouble’ or ‘She’s making a mess’ or even ‘There go my tax returns’. The thought that should have come to my parent’s mind, however, was ‘One day she’ll be a mathematician’. My grandmother, who worked as a dressmaker, often allowed my sister and me to use her razor sharp scissors on the strips of leftover tracing paper. This paper is inspired by a notebook that I kept in grade school when I ‘studied’ paper dolls, and the figures are based on dolls found pressed between the pages.

Type
Articles
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 81 , Issue 490 , March 1997 , pp. 29 - 36
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 1997

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References

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