Erik Demaine

Erik D. Demaine ( born February 28, 1981 in Halifax ( Nova Scotia ) ), is a mathematician, computer scientist and artist. He holds Canadian and American citizenship. Since 2001 he is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His field of work includes, among other things, Mathematical Origami, data structures and computational geometry.

Scientific career

As a child, Erik got home lessons from his father, Martin L. Demaine. He attended from 1993-1995 Dalhousie University in Canada, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree at the age of 14 years. From 1995-2001 he attended the University of Waterloo. He received, in 1996, a Master of Mathematics and received his PhD in 2001 at the age of 20 years. After receiving his doctorate was Erik Demaine 2001 Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ), where he is a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory since. He is the youngest professor who was appointed at MIT.

Erik Demaine is known primarily for his work in the field of mathematical origami. He also works in the areas of algorithms and data structures, computational geometry, and graph theory. Some of his best-known results are:

Each joint chain in the plane can be free from overlapping unfold to a straight line ( ruler problem) ( with Robert Connelly and Günter Rote ).
Each polygon may be cut with a straight cut ( fold- and-cut problem ) to a corresponding folding of a sheet of paper.
The generalized Rubik's Cube can be solved in trains ( with Martin L. Demaine, Sarah Eisenstat, Anna Lubiw, and Andrew Winslow ).

Artistic creation

Together with his father Martin Demaine Erik Demaine designed paper sculptures, which in 2008 were part of the exhibition "Design and the Elastic Mind" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA ) in New York. The exhibits shown there have been included in the permanent collection of MoMA.

Prizes and awards

Erik Demaine received for his dissertation, the Canadian Governor General's Gold Medal from the University of Waterloo and the NSERC Doctoral Prize ( 2003). In 2003 he received a grant from the MacArthur Foundation ( MacArthur Fellowship ). 2013 got Erik Demaine the Presburger Award for Young Scientists of the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science ( EATCS ) awarded. In the same year he was honored with a fellowship from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Others

In the documentary Between the Folds Erik Demaine occurs alongside 14 other origami on Künstern.

Erik Demaine

Scientific career

Artistic creation

Prizes and awards

Others

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