Erik D. Demaine | |
---|---|
Born | Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada | February 28, 1981
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 of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former child prodigy.
Demaine was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to mathematician and sculptor Martin 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 was home-schooled during that time span until entering university at the age of 12. [2] [3]
Demaine completed his bachelor's degree at 14 years of age at Dalhousie University in Canada, and completed his PhD at the University of Waterloo by the time he was 20 years old. [4] [5] Demaine's PhD dissertation, a work in the field of computational origami, was completed at the University of Waterloo under the supervision of Anna Lubiw and Ian Munro. [6] [7] This work was awarded the Canadian Governor General's Gold Medal from the University of Waterloo and the NSERC Doctoral Prize (2003) for the best PhD thesis and research in Canada. Some of the work from this thesis was later incorporated into his book Geometric Folding Algorithms on the mathematics of paper folding published with Joseph 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 the Theory of Computation group at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Mathematical origami artwork by Erik and Martin Demaine was part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit at the Museum 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 in Between the Folds , an international documentary film about origami practitioners which was later broadcast on PBS television. In connection with a 2012 exhibit, three of his curved origami artworks with Martin Demaine are in the permanent collection of the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Museum. [11]
Demaine was a fan of Martin Gardner and in 2001 he teamed up with his father Martin Demaine and Gathering 4 Gardner founder Tom 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 the MacArthur Fellowship, known colloquially as the "genius grant". [14]
In 2013, Demaine received the EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists. The award citation listed accomplishments including his work on the carpenter's rule problem, hinged dissection, prefix sum data structures, competitive analysis of binary search trees, graph minors, and computational origami. [15] That same year, he was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. [16]
For his work on bidimensionality, he was the winner of the Nerode 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 both fixed-parameter tractable exact algorithms and approximation algorithms for a class of algorithmic problems on graphs. [17]
In 2016, he became a fellow at the Association for Computing Machinery. [18] He was given an honorary doctorate by Bard College in 2017. [19]
The discipline of origami or paper folding has received a considerable amount of mathematical study. Fields of interest include a given paper model's flat foldability, and the use of paper folds to solve mathematical equations up to the third order.
In geometry, a net of a polyhedron is an arrangement of non-overlapping edge-joined polygons in the plane which can be folded to become the faces of the polyhedron. Polyhedral nets are a useful aid to the study of polyhedra and solid geometry in general, as they allow for physical models of polyhedra to be constructed from material such as thin cardboard.
Kawasaki's theorem or Kawasaki–Justin theorem is a theorem in the mathematics of paper folding that describes the crease patterns with a single vertex that may be folded to form a flat figure. It states that the pattern is flat-foldable if and only if alternatingly adding and subtracting the angles of consecutive folds around the vertex gives an alternating sum of zero. Crease patterns with more than one vertex do not obey such a simple criterion, and are NP-hard to fold.
Joseph O'Rourke is the Spencer T. and Ann W. Olin Professor of Computer Science at Smith College and the founding chair of the Smith computer science department. His main research interest is computational geometry.
Rigid origami is a branch of origami which is concerned with folding structures using flat rigid sheets joined by hinges. That is, unlike in traditional origami, the panels of the paper cannot be bent during the folding process; they must remain flat at all times, and the paper only folded along its hinges. A rigid origami model would still be foldable if it was made from glass sheets with hinges in place of its crease lines.
Martin L. (Marty) Demaine is an artist and mathematician, the Angelika and Barton Weller artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
In the mathematics of paper folding, map folding and stamp folding are two problems of counting the number of ways that a piece of paper can be folded. In the stamp folding problem, the paper is a strip of stamps with creases between them, and the folds must lie on the creases. In the map folding problem, the paper is a map, divided by creases into rectangles, and the folds must again lie only along these creases.
The fold-and-cut theorem states that any shape with straight sides can be cut from a single (idealized) sheet of paper by folding it flat and making a single straight complete cut. Such shapes include polygons, which may be concave, shapes with holes, and collections of such shapes.
Stefan Langerman false Swarzberg is a Belgian computer scientist and mathematician whose research topics include computational geometry, data structures, and recreational mathematics. He is professor and co-head of the algorithms research group at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) with Jean Cardinal. He is a director of research for the Belgian Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS–FNRS).
Mihai Pătrașcu was a Romanian-American computer scientist at AT&T Labs in Florham Park, New Jersey, United States.
The EATCS–IPEC Nerode Prize is a theoretical computer science prize awarded for outstanding research in the area of multivariate algorithmics. It is awarded by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science and the International Symposium on Parameterized and Exact Computation. The prize was offered for the first time in 2013.
Anna Lubiw is a computer scientist known for her work in computational geometry and graph theory. She is currently a professor at the University of Waterloo.
Mohammad Taghi Hajiaghayi is a computer scientist known for his work in algorithms, game theory, social networks, network design, graph theory, and big data. He has over 200 publications with over 185 collaborators and 10 issued patents.
In geometry, Steffen's polyhedron is a flexible polyhedron discovered by and named after Klaus Steffen. It is based on the Bricard octahedron, but unlike the Bricard octahedron its surface does not cross itself. It has nine vertices, 21 edges, and 14 triangular faces. Its faces can be decomposed into three subsets: two six-triangle-patches from a Bricard octahedron, and two more triangles that link these patches together.
Fedor V. Fomin is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Bergen. He is known for his work in algorithms and graph theory. He received his PhD in 1997 at St. Petersburg State University under Nikolai Nikolaevich Petrov.
Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra is a monograph on the mathematics and computational geometry of mechanical linkages, paper folding, and polyhedral nets, by Erik Demaine and Joseph O'Rourke. It was published in 2007 by Cambridge University Press (ISBN 978-0-521-85757-4). A Japanese-language translation by Ryuhei Uehara was published in 2009 by the Modern Science Company (ISBN 978-4-7649-0377-7).
In the mathematics of paper folding, the big-little-big lemma is a necessary condition for a crease pattern with specified mountain folds and valley folds to be able to be folded flat. It differs from Kawasaki's theorem, which characterizes the flat-foldable crease patterns in which a mountain-valley assignment has not yet been made. Together with Maekawa's theorem on the total number of folds of each type, the big-little-big lemma is one of the two main conditions used to characterize the flat-foldability of mountain-valley assignments for crease patterns that meet the conditions of Kawasaki's theorem. Mathematical origami expert Tom Hull calls the big-little-big lemma "one of the most basic rules" for flat foldability of crease patterns.
Tomohiro Tachi is a Japanese academic who studies origami from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining approaches from the mathematics of paper folding, structural rigidity, computational geometry, architecture, and materials science. His work was profiled in "The Origami Revolution" (2017), part of the Nova series of US science documentaries. He is a professor at the University of Tokyo.
In the geometry of convex polyhedra, blooming or continuous blooming is a continuous three-dimensional motion of the surface of the polyhedron, cut to form a polyhedral net, from the polyhedron into a flat and non-self-overlapping placement of the net in a plane. As in rigid origami, the polygons of the net must remain individually flat throughout the motion, and are not allowed to intersect or cross through each other. A blooming, reversed to go from the flat net to a polyhedron, can be thought of intuitively as a way to fold the polyhedron from a paper net without bending the paper except at its designated creases.
In geometry, a common net is a net that can be folded onto several polyhedra. To be a valid common net, there shouldn't exist any non-overlapping sides and the resulting polyhedra must be connected through faces. The research of examples of this particular nets dates back to the end of the 20th century, despite that, not many examples have been found. Two classes, however, have been deeply explored, regular polyhedra and cuboids. The search of common nets is usually made by either extensive search or the overlapping of nets that tile the plane.