Whether this article would get more or less attention with this changed title depends a lot on the ratio "viewers from the USA"/"viewers from other countries".

Akira Yoshizawa actually used origami in a factory setting to communicate geometric and engineering concepts.

The Greeks were not adverse to studying topics outside of the classic axioms, for example neusis, conic sections, or Archimedes work on quadrature (which presaged calculus):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neusis_construction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conic_section

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_(mathematics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_of_the_Parabola

They just preferred the simpler axioms on grounds of aesthetic parsimony.

As far as I know, the ancient Greeks never thought to fold the paper. It has, however, been studied since the 1980's by modern mathematicians:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huzita%E2%80%93Hatori_axioms

It can be used to trisecting an angle, an impossible construction with straightedge and compass:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SL2lYcggGpc&t=185s

It's more powerful than compass and straight-edge constructions, but not by much. It essentially gives you cube roots in addition to square roots. You still need a completely different point of view to make the quantum leap the the real numbers, calculus, and limits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo%E2%80%93Fraenkel_set_t...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dedekind_cut

So ultimately I don't know if it would have changed the course of history that much.

UV maps, especially for low-poly models, do not generally have a 1:1 geometric relationship with polygons in the original model. Areas with more significant detail will get more space on the UV map, mirrored or repeating areas will be overlapped, and of course UV maps will never include the tabs you'd need to physically glue parts together.

That's pretty awesome. I'd love to see the Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk get the same treatment. Seems like its angular design would lend itself well towards an origami version.

He specifically set a constraint for now curved surfaces. Using cylindrical and conical surfaces would have violated that constraint.

That type of shape constraint would be called having a ruled surface with a Gaussian curvature of 0 everywhere, otherwise known as a 'Developable Surface'.

Fitting a -single- such surface to a set of points is nearly trivial; finding a way to best fit -multiple- such surfaces together to approximate a non-trivial shape (cloud of points) where they share edges in a way that could be joined like this paper model.... feels very NP-hard to me. This is a subset of the problem in the 3d-scan-to-CAD industry where you have a point cloud/mesh and you need to detect flat planes, cylinders, fillets, etc of a 3d scan and best-fit primitive surfaces to those areas and then join them into a manifold while respecting a bunch of other geometric and tolerance constraints.

There is a reason why there are only a few software packages that even attempt to do this, and it is almost always human-guided in some way. It's a fascinating problem.