Erik D. Demaine, Canadian computer scientist, educator. Named one of Brilliant 10, Popular Science magazine, 2003; recipient Early Career Principal Investigator award, Department Energy, 2004, CAREER award, National Science Foundation, 2004; fellow MacArthur Foundation, 2003; grantee Alfred P. Sloan Research fellowship, since 2006.
Background
Demaine was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to the artist sculptor Martin L. Demaine and Judy Anderson. Demaine was a child prodigy. At age 7, he spent time traveling North America with his father, and he was home-schooled until entering college at the age of 12.
Education
Demaine studied at Dalhousie University in Canada, completed his bachelor"s degree at 14 years old, and completed his Doctor of Philosophy at University of Waterloo when he was 20 years old. Demaine"s Doctor of Philosophy dissertation, a seminal work in the field of computational origami, was completed at the University of Waterloo.
Career
This work was awarded the Canadian Governor General"s Gold Medal from the University of Waterloo and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council Doctoral Prize (2003) for the best Doctor of Philosophy thesis and research in Canada (one of four awards). This thesis work was largely incorporated into a book Demaine joined the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty in 2001 at age 20, reportedly the youngest professor in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was promoted to full professor in 2011.
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.
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 Public Broadcasting Service television
Membership
Member of Society Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Mathematics Association American, Canada Mathematics Society, American Mathematics Society, Association Computing Machinery Special Interest Grp. on Algorithms and Computation Theory, Association Computing Machinery.