Jeremy Shafer of BARF (Bay Area Rapid Folders) and author of Origami to Astonish and Amuse is a connoisseur of entertainment. He juggles fireballs, unicycles, handwhistles… and probably most impressively, he folds. He folds paper, that is, and he folds it into the most ornate tessellation patterns!
“One of Shafer's signature pieces is the “flasher.” The flasher hat below folds up instantly to a cylinder no bigger than a roll of toilet paper. In fact, some of Shafer's flashers fold up by themselves if you let go of them.
As a student at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he majored in mathematics because “it was the most origami-like of the majors,” and he presented a senior seminar on flashers. Even his professors were baffled, Shafer recalls. “I taught them how to fold a flasher,” Shafer says. “I was practically having to fold it for them, because they had the instructions in front of them but they couldn't follow them. That was quite a turnaround, you know—you have all those geniuses, and they can't even fold the basic flasher!””
He offers some PDF diagrams of origami here. Videos of him folding and unfolding his unique wonders of multi-colored paper can be found on the Exploratorium Magazine site. Jeremy is a truly fascinating individual!
Other interesting links:
Regular and Semi-Regular Tessellations in Paper
Puzzellations – Tessellation puzzles
Fractallations – Fractal Tessellation puzzle.