Robert Lang is an American physicist and origami theorist — yes, you read that right — who worked for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and other scientific research labs. But in 2001 he left his job at fibre-optics specialist JDS Uniphase to become a full-time paper-folder. "There is always something new to try," he says. "A new problem, a new subject, a new shape that I didn't think I was able to create before but now I think I know how to realize it."