About Mu-Tsun Tsai

Mu-Tsun Tsai (蔡牧村, b.1985) is from Taiwan. He was originally a student in math studying number theory and combinatorics, and later switched carrier and became a full-stack software engineer. Like almost everybody, he had some experience in folding simple models in childhood, but that was it. He was first fascinated with origami during college when he watched Satoshi Kamiya's amazing performance on the TV Champion show. He began to build up the basics with Jun Maekawa's book Genuine Origami, and progressively moved on to more challenging models in various literatures.

But he didn't thought about designing until a few years later he had the chance to carefully study the first edition of Origami Design Secrets by Dr. Robert J. Lang. After designing dozens of relatively simple models, Tsai finally came up with the first confident design, his African Elephant. He braced himself and sent the design to Lang, and fortunately it went very well; Lang liked the model and sent back many encouraging words, and Tsai never stopped working on origami ever since.

Lang later on realized that Tsai was unaware of the second edition of ODS, so he directed Tsai to the new edition, suspecting that Tsai might come up with new ideas from the new chapters with his math background. And indeed, after reading the new chapter dedicated to polygon packing, Tsai came up with a system to further generalized Pythagorean stretches. During several rounds of corresponding, together they polished the system into now known as GOPS, and they wrote a join paper on it which was published in 7OSME.

Since then, using his specialties in software developing, Tsai spent about two years developing an app that could help designers plan their box pleating layouts and automatically calculate GOPS on the fly. The result was the app that made Tsai famous in the origami society: his Box Pleating Studio.

Tsai has a deep passion for super-complex origami. Like many other designers, he continues to justify the well-known saying that "everything is possible in origami" through his designs and researches.