Thursday, October 4, 2007

IDEAS Boston -- Erik Demaine

Erik Demaine is an MIT professor of Computer Science. His research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He received a 2003 MacArthur Fellowship as a "computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending -- moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter." Demaine recently wrote a book about folding, together with Joseph O'Rourke, called "Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra" (2007).

At lunch, I noticed that Demaine's father, Martin, who home-schooled him, and who also solves puzzles for a living at MIT, is here, too.

Demaine starts off by saying that the many things on which he works are informed by one central idea: "Having fun." I didn't want to like this guy, but he seems pretty cool.

Folding (or unfolding) is Demaine's area of expertise. Animated graphics, robotic arms for space stations, hydraulic tubes -- all might be improved if we knew more about folding. Proteins, the fundamental building block of life, are folded by nature; if we could fold proteins into any shape that we wanted, Demaine says, we could eradicate HIV, among other things. But it's hard to fold "three-dimensional linkages." Demaine would like to discover nature's folding algorithm; but he admits that there may be no such thing. (These scientists are appealingly honest, and modest.)

Next, we get into origami -- which, as we know from that New Yorker essay not long ago -- has in the past 25 years undergone a revolution. Demaine shows us slides of a Black Forest Cuckoo Clock, a pangolin, a tarantula and a hermit crab -- amazingly accurate models of these things and more, all folded out of one square of paper, "no cuts." Plus: A ship being attacked by a giant squid, folded out of one sheet of paper.

We understand more about origami mathematics and algorithms now, says Demaine; that's why we can make such amazing origami, these days. Demaine then does some magic tricks: He unfolds a red-and-white checkerboard that turns out to be one sheet of paper, red on one side, white on the other. He folds a rectangle of paper into an odd shape, cuts it once, and shows us that one piece of paper has become a swan; then he shows us the mathematical design for that swan. Oohs and aahs.

Nano-manufacturing, car airbags, sculpture, reconfigurable robots (think "Terminator 2"), self-assembly, even DNA manipulation. Folding isn't just fun -- it's amazing.

Ashbrook: "I hoped Erik would be a nerd. But he's so cool!"

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 02:36 PM

Print | E-mail to a friend | Permalink | Subscribe via rss