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Paper and Glass
Learning looks like fun for Erik Demaine
By Lisa Scanlon

It’s a cold fall morning at MIT, but the glass lab in the basement of Building 4 is hot enough to make protective goggles slide off sweaty noses. Erik Demaine and his father, Martin, seem oblivious to the heat, as Erik shapes the glowing, molten neck of what will become a glass vase. Erik, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer science, is having a practice session for the glassblowing class he is taking. Today he’s being assisted by his father, a visiting scientist in computer science who also happens to be a renowned glass artisan. Erik takes a large pair of metal shears and cuts around the viscous mouth of the vase, trimming off a centimeter or so. “Show off,” Martin says with a smile. He points out that Erik has never trimmed a vase before, and doing it as a demonstration is pretty gutsy. Martin nods approvingly at his son’s handiwork and says to Erik, “I’ll bet even you like this one.” Erik agrees, distracted; he’s already onto the next step.

It’s obvious after some time with Erik that his work is always creative and often collaborative, and that it can frequently be mistaken for play. Back in his Stata Center office, a room crowded with beautiful glass vases and origami structures, Erik explains how he got his artist father interested in mathematics and computer science. Erik was home-schooled until he was 12, when he entered Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as an undergraduate. Martin “would go to most of my classes,” Erik explains. “His motivation was that he wanted to still be able to talk to me about stuff that I do. Once we started doing theoretical computer science, it became a lot more creative, and then he got more and more interested.”

While Erik was a doctoral student at the University of Waterloo, he met Robert Lang, one of the first people to study computational origami, the design of algorithms for solving paper-­folding problems, with applications in everything from manufacturing to protein folding. Soon after, Erik attended a few of the larger origami conferences, “which are, like, a few thousand paper folders all just folding for three days solid. It’s a crazy atmosphere,” Erik says. Since then, computational origami has been one of his main areas of research.

Last fall, Erik taught his first computational-geometry class devoted to folding. At one session, he played a computer simulation of a cube unfolding and then refolding into surprising new shapes. “Here’s one random unfolding we drew on a piece of paper in a hotel room in Tokyo one evening. We call this ‘the spaceship,’” he said to the class. During the class’s problem-solving sessions, Erik and the students try to solve open problems—such as theorems that have been proposed but never proven. “We’ve worked on the same problem for two sessions, and we seem to have pretty much solved it,” he says, as if he were talking about the New York Times crossword puzzle, not a complicated geometrical conundrum that has baffled mathematicians for years.