Erik Demaine is a Professor in Computer Science and the youngest person ever to be hired to be a professor at MIT (at age 20). Demaine entered Dalhousie University when he was 12, earned his bachelor's degree two years later in 1995, then went to the University of Waterloo for his master's degree in math (1996) and his Ph.D. (2001). At age 17, he had unfolded the secret behind a complicated geometry problem. Demaine and his collaborators proved mathematically that it is possible to create any conceivable straight-sided shape by folding a piece of paper and making a single scissor cut. This launched the field of computational origami, an interdisciplinary endeavor on the boundary of computer science and mathematics.

Demaine's research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a MacArthur Fellowship as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending--moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter". He appears in the recent origami documentary Between the Folds, cowrote a book about the theory of folding (Geometric Folding Algorithms), and a book about the computational complexity of games (Games, Puzzles, and Computation). His interests span the connections between mathematics and art, particularly sculpture and performance, including curved origami sculptures in the permanent collection of Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Lecture Series Spring 2011:

// ANTOINE PICON
TUESDAY FEB 8 | 11:30AM | 123

// AXEL KILIAN
THURSDAY FEB 24 | 2:30PM | 109

// ERIK DEMAINE
MONDAY FEB 28 | 3:00PM | 517