Robert J. Lang (born May 4, 1961) is an American physicist who is also one of the foremost origami artists and theorists in the world. He is known for his complex and elegant designs, most notably of insects and animals. He has studied the mathematics of origami and used computers to study the theories behind origami. He has made great advances in making real-world applications of origami to engineering problems. Education and early occupation Lang was born in Dayton, Ohio, and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. Lang studied electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology, where he met his wife-to-be, Diane. He earned a master's degree in electrical engineering at Stanford University in 1983, and returned to Caltech for a Ph.D. in applied physics, with a dissertation titled Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties. Lang began work for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1988. Lang also worked as a research scientist for Spectra Diode Labs of San Jose, California, and then at JDS Uniphase, also of San Jose. Lang has authored or co-authored over 80 publications on semiconductor lasers, optics, and integrated optoelectronics, and holds 46 patents in these fields. In 2001, Lang left the engineering field to be a full-time origami artist and consultant. However, he still maintains ties to his physics background: he was the editor-in-chief of the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics from 2007 to 2010, and has done part-time laser consulting for Cypress Semiconductor, among others. Lang currently resides in Altadena, California. Origami Lang was introduced to origami at the age of six by a teacher who had exhausted other methods of keeping him entertained in the classroom. By his early teens, he was designing original origami patterns. Lang used origami as an escape from the pressures of undergraduate studies. While studying at Caltech, Lang came into contact with other origami masters such as Michael LaFosse, John Montroll, Joseph Wu, and Paul Jackson through the Origami Center of America, now known as OrigamiUSA. While in Germany for postdoctoral work, Lang and his wife were enamored of Black Forest cuckoo clocks, and he became a sensation in the origami world when he successfully folded one after three months of design and six hours of actual folding. In 1990, Lang first attempted to write computer code that would solve origami problems, and the result was his first version of Tree Maker. Lang takes full advantage of