Jay Kappraff

I became aware of the work of Ron Resch in 1978 when I began to teach the Mathematics of Design to students from the NJIT School of Architecture.  Each semester that I would teach this course, I would show Resch’s film,“The Ron Resch Paper and Stick Film”, as a way to inspire the students.  I proceeded to show the film to high level audiences at the Courant Institute who also found this work to be mind-opening. 

"Mr. Resch has a unique capacity to blend original ideas of design on both a theoretical level, and practical hands-on level.  Besides being a superb craftsman, he proceeds to augment these talents with an extraordinary facility to create computer models of whatever he is able to do in the tactile world.  In fact he bypasses the usual need to do his three-dimensional geometric modeling and animation with off the shelf design applications by programming directly in the low level language PostScript.

There is no better example of what Resch is capable of doing than his design, fabrication, and construction of a giant Ukrainian Easter egg out of aluminum on the Plains of Alberta, Canada which he designed and engineered using entirely his own original ideas.  It is a miracle of design which I included in my book, Connections: The Geometric Bridge between Art and Science. 

After approaching the limits of physical design he made important contributions to the early development of computer graphics and computer-aided design being the first person to do key-frame animation by computer.  He did this both in his teaching position at University of Utah, in his role as Director, Computer Graphics Center, Boston University, where he designed the mouth that swallowed the starship Enterprise in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979), and in his position at the premier company for computer graphs, Evans and Sutherland.

He is also well-known in the area of origami having created a whole new class of periodic folding in the early 1960’s now called origami tessellation.  He made several discoveries at the interface of origami and geometry.  He continues to develop new approaches to the study of surface geometry.  I consider his work at the interface of mathematics, computer science, and design to be of singular value.  He has an uncanny ability to think out of the box and find new ideas in otherwise familiar terrain.  His intuition and creativity enables him to extract valuable ideas from what would be otherwise commonplace."

Jay Kappraff

Associate Prof. of Mathematics

New Jersey Institute of Technology

University Heights

Newark, NJ 07102