https://www.wired.com/story/an-origami-artist-shows-how-to-fold-ultra-realistic-creatures/

Before becoming a physicist, before being the editor in chief of the Journal of Quantum Electronics, before helping NASA design its largest space telescope, Robert Lang learned to fold paper.

Already a numbers whiz at age six, Lang had trouble sitting still during math class. His teacher gave him an origami book to keep him occupied and Lang started to fold. He never stopped. He folded his way through high school and his undergraduate years at Caltech, decorating his shelves with a parade of tiny paper ants. He kept folding throughout his graduate work in applied physics, when in 1987, he made an actual-size cuckoo clock after a trip to Germany’s Black Forest.