Allan Penn
The algorithm method: Demaine adds value at MIT.
WHO: Erik Demaine, MIT math wunderkind
PRODIGY: In 2001, at the age of 20, Demaine became the youngest faculty member in MIT history. This fall, he won a $500,000 MacArthur fellowship - the so-called genius grant. First thing he did when he heard about the award: went online to check out the previous winners.
NUMBERS GAME: Demaine applies math where you wouldn't expect it. He's a pioneer in the field of computational origami, but to avoid being typecast as "the folding guy," he says, he's also demonstrated the mathematical complexities of Tetris. And he juggles.
PRACTICAL MATH: Suppose your credit card company charges a spurious late fee, then charges interest on the fee and interest on the interest. Demaine devised what he calls a retroactive algorithm: It changes the past inside a database, undoing errors carried over from month to month.
JUST FOR FUN: Demaine's adaptive algorithm for accelerating Web searches computes the mathematical difficulty of a given query and devotes less processing time to the easy ones. Speed is one of the qualities that makes search engines worth billions. But Demaine hasn't patented his formula - or anything else. "I'm not interested in making money," he explains. "I just like solving problems." That said, he's not giving back the MacArthur grant.
START
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Hacking: The New Crack
Professor Tetris
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A Dissertation So Good It Might Be Classified
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