Erik D. Demaine | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | (1981-02-28)February 28, 1981 (age 44) Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian and American |
| Alma mater | Dalhousie University University of Waterloo |
| Awards | MacArthur Fellow (2003) Nerode Prize (2015) ACM Fellow (2016) |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| Thesis | Folding and Unfolding (2001) |
| Doctoral advisor | |
| Doctoral students | |
Erik D. Demaine (born February 28, 1981) is a Canadian-American professor ofcomputer science at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology and a formerchild prodigy.
Demaine was born inHalifax, Nova Scotia, to mathematician and sculptorMartin L. Demaine and Judy Anderson. From the age of 7, he was identified as a child prodigy and spent time traveling across North America with his father.[1] He washome-schooled during that time span until entering university at the age of 12.[2][3]
Demaine completed hisbachelor's degree at 14 years of age atDalhousie University in Canada, and completed hisPhD at theUniversity of Waterloo by the time he was 20 years old.[4][5]Demaine'sPhD dissertation, a work in the field ofcomputational origami, was completed at the University of Waterloo under the supervision ofAnna Lubiw andIan Munro.[6][7] This work was awarded the CanadianGovernor General's Gold Medal from theUniversity of Waterloo and theNSERC Doctoral Prize (2003) for the bestPhD thesis and research in Canada. Some of the work from this thesis was later incorporated into his bookGeometric Folding Algorithms on themathematics of paper folding published withJoseph O'Rourke in 2007.[8]
Demaine joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001 at age 20, reportedly the youngest professor in the history of MIT,[4][9] and was promoted to full professorship in 2011. Demaine is a member of theTheory of Computation group atMIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Mathematical origami artwork by Erik and Martin Demaine was part of theDesign and the Elastic Mind exhibit at theMuseum of Modern Art in 2008, and has been included in the MoMA permanent collection.[10] That same year, he was one of the featured artists inBetween the Folds, an international documentary film about origami practitioners which was later broadcast onPBS television. In connection with a 2012 exhibit, three of his curved origami artworks with Martin Demaine are in the permanent collection of theRenwick Gallery of theSmithsonian Museum.[11]
Demaine was a fan ofMartin Gardner and in 2001 he teamed up with his fatherMartin Demaine andGathering 4 Gardner founderTom M. Rodgers to edit a tribute book for Gardner on his 90th birthday.[12] From 2016 to 2020 he was president of the board of directors of Gathering 4 Gardner.[13]
In 2003, Demaine was awarded theMacArthur Fellowship, known colloquially as the "genius grant".[14]
In 2013, Demaine received the EATCSPresburger Award for young scientists. The award citation listed accomplishments including his work on thecarpenter's rule problem,hinged dissection,prefix sum data structures,competitive analysis ofbinary search trees,graph minors, and computationalorigami.[15] That same year, he was awarded a fellowship by theJohn Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.[16]
For his work onbidimensionality, he was the winner of theNerode Prize in 2015 along with his co-authors Fedor Fomin, Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, and Dimitrios Thilikos. The work was the study of a general technique for developing bothfixed-parameter tractable exact algorithms andapproximation algorithms for a class of algorithmic problems on graphs.[17]
In 2016, he became a fellow at theAssociation for Computing Machinery.[18] He was given an honorary doctorate byBard College in 2017.[19]
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