Erik Demaine: A Multitalented Former Child Prodigy

Child Prodigies are not just extraordinary, born-talented, marvelous humans. They’re curious and focused enthusiasts who are hardworking and tenacious in their respective domains. One such example is Erik Demaine, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Early life

Demaine was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He discovered that his prodigious at seven and spent his early years’ homeschooling until 12.

Demaine being an extraordinary kid that he was, completed his under graduation from Dalhousie University at 14 years old. He also did his Ph.D. by the age of 20 from the University of Waterloo and is currently a professor at MIT, and he is also the youngest professor ever to be in MIT.

Erik Demaine has even featured in two documentaries, ‘Between the Folds’ and ‘NOVA’s The Origami Revolution’ based on origami practitioners. Demaine, with his truckloads of interest, has excelled in many areas. His interests consist of discrete and computational geometry, theoretical computer science and mathematics, advanced data structures, complexity theory graph algorithms, biology, programming languages, network and mobile computing, and many more. 

A glance of his perception

As Demaine said in one of his interviews with DDJ, “I work on many things at once. I could go out on quite a while on different things” This shows how much multi-tasking he does, in general, to accomplish what he has earned and to exercise or to channelize the talent he possesses being a prodigy productively and persistently. He also said in the same interview while answering, “what is ‘interesting'”? He replied, “finding answers to the problem we don’t know the answer to or proving that there isn’t one.” That’s the name of the game in algorithms. Find a problem that no one has solved before, nor shown that it’s unsolvable.” The curiosity to find unsolved issues and find answers to those has always been a growing seed in Demaine.

Demaine: A Much talented artist and a writer.

The young prodigy isn’t just into mathematics and computer science, but his span of interests follows art and writing too. Demaine has a heart for origami and does it excellently too. He has also sculpted curved–crease sculpture with his father in his basement, combining mathematics and art. His art piece kept in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Erik has written two books, one that he co-authored, which is based on geometry folding algorithms, and another which he wrote on the computational complexity of games.

Demaine’s accomplishments and achievements as a prodigy:

Demaine has achieved a lot till now; just like his area of interest and expertise, his acts are vast. Demaine has gained a lot of special recognition in his field of computer science and mathematics.

• Awarded with MacArthur fellowship, the well-known genius grant in 2003.
• EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists in 2013.
• Awarded with a fellowship by John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 2013 as well.
• Awarded with the Nerode prize for his work on bidimensionality with his coworkers Fedor Fomin, Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, and Dimitrios Thilikos.
• Became a fellow at Association for Computing Machinery in 2016.
• Received an honorary doctorate by Bard college in 2017.

Demaine’s accomplishments and hard work highlight how important it is to provide child prodigies with opportunities because they can achieve greatness and provide a better society or, in the words of Demaine himself, ‘find answers to unsolved problems.’

Also read: Cleopatra Stratan: The Youngest Person to Achieve Commercial Success.