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14-Year-Old Wins $25,000 After Discovering Miura‑ori Origami Can Hold Over 10,000× Its Weight

Miles Wu, a 14-year-old from New York City, won a $25,000 prize after testing 54 Miura‑ori origami configurations across 108 trials to measure their strength-to-weight ratios. He varied parallelogram widths, angles, heights, and paper types, and found that copy paper produced the best ratio. His strongest sample held over 10,000 times its own weight. Wu plans to use the award for education and to prototype Miura‑ori-based deployable shelters for emergency use.

10:27 PM, 11/28/2025Science
14-Year-Old Wins $25,000 After Discovering Miura‑ori Origami Can Hold Over 10,000× Its Weight

While many teenagers fold paper airplanes, 14-year-old Miles Wu combined his origami hobby with experimental physics to produce a finding with real-world potential. Wu won a $25,000 top prize for a research project testing the load-bearing properties of the Miura‑ori fold — a repeating parallelogram pattern that collapses and expands predictably.

What he tested

Wu manually folded 54 variations of the Miura‑ori pattern and ran 108 trials to failure. He varied three parallelogram widths, three angles, and two heights, and compared three paper types. To ensure consistency he used a cutting machine for precise panels and placed each sample between guardrails before incrementally adding weight until collapse.

Key results

Contrary to his expectation that heavier stock would produce the best strength-to-weight ratio, Wu found that common copy paper produced the highest ratio. His strongest sample supported more than 10,000 times its own weight — a result he described with a colorful analogy: the equivalent of a New York City taxi carrying the weight of more than 4,000 elephants, by his calculation.

Method and improvisation

Wu began by stacking heavy books from his home and later used purchased exercise weights to push samples to failure. He observed that smaller, less acute panels generally performed better, though material choice mattered more subtly than he expected.

Implications and next steps

Wu hopes the Miura‑ori's combination of light weight, strength, and compact folding can improve deployable emergency structures such as shelters that must be strong, compact, and quickly erected. He plans to use the prize money toward education and early prototyping — translating paper-based folds into real materials for shelter design.

"A problem with current deployable structures is that they're rarely all three: strong, highly compactable, and easy to deploy — Miura‑ori could potentially solve that," Wu said.

Maya Ajmera, president and CEO of the Society for Science, praised Wu's combination of experimental rigor and leadership in competition challenges, noting judges look for creative problem solving and resilience as well as strong projects.

Wu's work is an example of how simple geometric patterns from origami can inspire engineering solutions in disaster relief, medical devices, and other fields that benefit from robust, foldable designs.

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