What fascinated him above all else, Dr. Tanner said, ''was how the mathematics could become manifest in the paper. You'd think paper can't do that, but he'd say you just don't know paper well enough.''

One of Dr. Huffman's discoveries was the critical ''pi condition.'' This says that if you have a point, or vertex, surrounded by four creases and you want the form to fold flat, then opposite angles around the vertex must sum to 180 degrees -- or using the measure that mathematicians prefer, to pi radians. Others have rediscovered that condition, Dr. Lang said, and it has now generalized for more than four creases. In this case, whatever the number of creases, all alternate angles must sum to pi. How and under what conditions things can fold flat is a major concern in computational origami.

Dr. Huffman's folding was a private activity. Professionally he worked in the field of coding and information theory. As a student at M.I.T. in the 1950's, he discovered a minimal way of encoding information known as Huffman Codes, which are now used to help compress MP3 music files and JPEG images. Dr. Peter Newman of the Computer Science Laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute said that in everything Dr. Huffman did, he was obsessed with elegance and simplicity. ''He had an ability to visualize problems and to see things that nobody had seen before,'' Dr. Newman said.

Like Mr. Resch, Dr. Huffman seemed innately attracted to elegant forms. Before he took up paper folding, he was interested in what are called ''minimal surfaces,'' the shapes that soap bubbles make. He carried this theme into origami, experimenting with ways that pleated patterns of straight folds can give rise to curving three-dimensional surfaces. Dr. Erik Demaine of M.I.T.'s Laboratory for Computer Science, who is now pursuing similar research, described Dr. Huffman's work in this area as ''awesome.''

Finally, Dr. Huffman moved into studying models in which the folds themselves were curved. ''We know almost nothing about curved creases,'' said Dr. Demaine, who is using computer software to simulate the behavior of paper under the influence of curving folds. Much of Dr. Huffman's research was based on curves derived from conic sections, such as the hyperbola and the ellipse.

His marriage of aesthetics and science has grown into a field that goes well beyond paper. Dr. Tanner noted that his research is relevant to real-world problems where you want to know how sheets of material will behave under stress. Pressing sheet metal for car bodies is one example. ''Understanding what's going to happen to the metal,'' which will stretch, ''is related to the question of how far it is from the case of paper,'' which will not, Dr. Tanner said.

The mathematician G.H. Hardy wrote that ''there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.'' Dr. Huffman, who gave concrete form to beautiful mathematical relations, would no doubt have agreed. In a talk he gave at U.C. Santa Cruz in 1979 to an audience of artists and scientists, he noted that it was rare for the two groups to communicate with one another.