Student Turned Paper Folding Into A $100,000 Prize At The World's Largest Science Fair

Hikaru Kuribayashi grew up in Sapporo, Japan, fascinated by the way things fold. He noticed that nature had already solved the problem humans struggle with most in engineering: how to make something large fit inside something small. A ladybug's wing unfolds perfectly every time. A leaf follows the Miura-ori fold, the same pattern used in satellite solar sails. But existing computer models could only trace folding movements one path at a time, unable to account for all the warps a flexible real-world material might take. At 17 years old, Hikaru built a program that could. His probability-based simulation maps the complete range of motions a folded structure can make, accounting for soft and hyper-flexible real-world behavior that previous tools missed. At the 2026 Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix, the world's largest pre-college science competition with 1,700 students from 67 countries competing for over $7 million in prizes, Hikaru's project won the $100,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award, the highest prize at the fair. He also won first place in the physics category for an additional $6,000.

The applications are not abstract. Tools built on Hikaru's model could help engineers design satellite solar sails that unfold reliably in zero gravity, medical devices that expand safely inside the human body, and emergency shelters that can be packed flat and deployed quickly. The more sophisticated the fold, the harder it is to predict how it will behave under stress, and an error in that calculation means expensive equipment that fails at the wrong moment. Hikaru found a better way to predict it, using nature's own folding logic as the blueprint. He was 17 when he won $106,000 for it.

Source:https://www.businessinsider.com/origami-japan-science-engineering-ai-teen-young-geniuses-2026-7