March 22, 2003

BORN on Feb 28, 1981, in Nova Scotia, Canada, Erik Demaine is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Theory of Computation group in the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

His research interests span much of theoretical computer science and mathematics, in particular with connections to algorithms. Some of his major research foci include discrete and computational geometry (particularly folding and unfolding of linkages, paper, polyhedral, and proteins) and advanced data structures.

Other areas he has explored and in which he is actively interested include adaptive algorithms, graph theory and algorithms, string matching, randomized algorithms, computational complexity, approximation algorithms, discrete mathematics, and combinatorial game theory. This may seem a bit too much for a 21 year old but the reality is way more surprising. On the systems side, he has very successfully, done research in programming languages, parallel and distributed systems, and scientific computing.

When he was 12, Erik Demaine talked himself into Dalhousie University in his home town Halifax, Nova Scotia, despite having no grades or academic record to speak of. Eight years and a PhD later, he became the youngest professor at the Massachusetts institute of Technology. He specializes in computational origami — the geometry of paper folding. He follows such an unconventional route to the academic elite.

While some view origami strictly as an art form, Erik Demaine finds great theoretical challenges in the ancient Japanese practice. In MIT’s Laboratory for computer science, he is exploring how it might yield new insights into diverse areas such as protein folding, gift wrapping and the deployment of automobile airbags. Welcome to the arcane realm of computational geometry, in which the 21-year-old Demaine is one of the youngest and moist accomplished practitioners. He also has a passion for puzzles of all kinds, developed during a childhood spent partly on the road with his father — a glass-blower, goldsmith, silversmith and puzzle maker.

He left school at seven and spent the next five years on the road with his father because to him it seemed like a fun thing to do. His father, Martin, was a craftsman which made it easy for him to travel and sell his stuff at craft fairs through out the US. To him it was a very free-form existence. Their movements weren’t guided by anything specific than “That seems like an interesting place to go.”

He learned a lot just from talking to people. His father always stressed communication skills that served him well in his academia. He is not at all shy about approaching people to test out ideas. In fact, when he takes on a big problem, that’s the first thing he does.

In spite of all these years of wandering his dad taught him from home-school manuals they got from an agency in Washington DC. When Erik was nine, it became more efficient for him to teach himself from the same materials. That approach worked well for everything but spelling, which is hard to test one’s own self on. But Erik and his dad figured out a system for that too.

Erik was a little curious about what went on inside the classroom so he kept on checking normal schools from time to time to make sure he wasn’t missing anything. The main thing he learned from that was how much time is wasted in school when one takes away lunch, recess and other breaks. The nine-to-three day reduces to about one hour of real instruction.

To him home schooling is much more efficient as one gets one-on-one training and can work right through summer when most kids forget everything they’ve learned in the previous months.

Erik was no doubt a little smarter than other kids his age. He would learn things way quickly as compared to normal children. As for his interest in mathematics, it started from playing video games when he was quite young. Once he asked his dad how people wrote those games. His dad got hold of some books on programming so he could teach Erik and soon Erik was reading the books on his own. After a year or so of that his dad said, “If you want to be good at computers, you have to be good at mathematics.” So Erik said, “Ok, let’s learn some mathematics.” He mainly started with a high-school algebra text, and things took off from there.

He is surely someone special in his own way to have talked his way into Dalhousie University as a 12-year-old. But in his case, it makes it easier when one is pursuing things he or she is interested in. Erik still had to go through some political battles because of his young age, plus the fact that he hadn’t been to high school. At the time, one had to be 16 to enter Dalhousie. After some discussion, they let Erik in under special status. During the summer he took some mathematics and computer science courses as a test and did well enough for them to admit him in the fall.

In spite of being younger than both his faculty colleagues and many of his students at MIT, Erik tries to downplay the age thing because to him eventually everyone gets older. As for his father, he’s a visiting scientist at MIT. When MIT offered Erik a position, they offered his dad a position too. He has tried to keep up in mathematics, learning it as Erik have been learning it and it is amazing that he has come so far, given that he basically had to switch genres from art to mathematics, which is quite a difficult task.

Origami and computer programming seem so close to what Erik Demaine does in his day job but he still lists them as “hobbies” on his resume. The reason being that he makes very little distinction between working and having fun, because work to him is fun. Still, when he has time, he likes to make origami gifts. His hobby started after his research in this area, though many people do it the other way round. He also does computer programming for fun, even though it is a part of his job.

His first real accomplishment in mathematics started six years ago when he began his PhD work in computational geometry at University of Waterloo in Ontario, his dad remembered “the paper cut problem” from an article written in the 1960s on paper folding and mathematics. The idea was to take a piece of paper, fold it any way and as many times as you want, and then make one straight cut and see what shapes you get. The question was, are all shapes possible? This may sound complicated and confusing but not to Erik. He worked on this problem for two years at Dalhousie with his dad and advisor Anna Lubiw. After experimenting for a while, they realized one could make all kinds of shapes, such as butterflies, swans, hearts or stars. The hardest part was proving that any shape is possible, and they proved it. How? Well, according to Erik, “That process, in a word, is mathematics”

Erik’s greatest preoccupation at the moment is the problem he has been working on for five years now. He calls it his favorite problem. It has to do with a centuries old question: what three-dimensional shapes can one make by successively folding a flat sheet? Questions like these come up regularly in the sheet-metal industry: how do you cut a sheet and then use bending sequence? Theorists could make a big contribution here, but the mathematics is not yet fully developed.

Only about half his work is relates to the geometry of folding. Erik has a separate project that involves a new approach to organizing data. His hope is to make web searches quicker and more efficient. His basic goal is to keep moving into new areas of mathematics and not be confined to a single branch.

It may seem weird to have a tenured job and so much stability in your life at such a young age, considering Erik’s nomadic past but he says he is getting used to it. Stability seems like a good thing to him, and at present he can’t see any downside. However, age is no issue for this young man full of determination and it has never really been important in his life.

The writer is a freelance contri-butor

Please Visit our Sponsor (Ads open in separate window)