Yoshizawa, who would have been 101 years old on Wednesday, is credited with raising origami - the technique of folding paper into decorative forms -- from craft to art. For much of his early life, Yoshizawa toiled in obscurity, but he got his big break in 1951, when a Japanese magazine hired him him to fold the 12 signs of the Japanese zodiac. Over his lifetime, he created more than 50,000 origami models and wrote 18 books detailing his designs. Yoshizawa died in 2005.
The tribute for the Japanese-born Yoshizawa -- in the form of paper figures spelling out the Google logo -- comes almost exactly a year after the March 11, 2011 earthquake that devastated Japan.
In addition to being Yoshizawa's birthday, Wednesday, March 14 (3/14) is Pi Day. Google celebrated that date in 2010 with a Pi Day Doodle. That logo contained not only the famous πr2 formula, but five other uses of π: measuring the volume of a sphere (V = 4⁄3 πr3), computing the circumference of a circle (C = 2πr), measuring the volume of a cylinder (V = πr2h), Archimedes’ calculation of pi (223/71