Erik Demaine loves burnt caramel ice cream. He was born on the last day of February, making him a Pisces. He wears a size 13 in men's platform heels.
Also, when he was 20 years old, he went to MIT - not as a student, but as the youngest professor ever hired by the renowned university.
Erik blends in well with MIT's unique aesthetic. Now 24-years-old, he stands tall at 6'2, with a sand-blond beard and a ponytail of fuzzy hair reminiscent of a young Robert Plant. He relaxes at his desk in jeans, hiking books and a t-shirt. "They're sort of universal," he says in a soft, measured voice, explaining his fashion sense. "I can change my expression by changing my t-shirt. Every one I have has some sort of story." Today, he is wearing a t-shirt with a picture of a man juggling axes. He, himself, is an intermediate juggler.
Surprised? Despite racking up over a hundred papers with a Christmas list of collaborators, garnering a $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship and earning the adoration of his students, Erik is arrestingly down to earth.
"You want props? I have props!" He enthusiastically volunteers to help the photographer, going to shelves crowded with ivory shapes of pleated curves and blown vases of vermilion glass. Bright-blue bowls and foam-glass paperweights on the windowsill catch the sunlight reflected off a canary-yellow wing of MIT's Stata Center, the architectural marvel where his office is housed. He holds up a gigantic paper star, a smaller version of which he had made for his mother?s Christmas tree one year, and grins for the camera.
Every object in his office has a history. Puzzles of wood and metal share space with paper sculptures resembling the Sydney Opera House. Some are gifts from master origami artists. Other pieces come from the glass-blowing workshop of his father, an artisan and frequent collaborator.
"My father has led many different lives," he says, professing his admiration. Erik's parents divorced when he was young. He and his father left Halifax, Nova Scotia, and spent the next six years traveling throughout the United States. "Every place made an impression on me," he says. "Miami Beach, Providence, Chicago, and Traverse City - the Cherry Capital of the World!?
When Erik was growing up, his father worked primarily as an artist. Wherever they moved, his father would sell art at crafts shows. In a Miami Beach apartment complex, Erik basked in a rich community of kids his own age with whom he'd play whenever they got out of school. Describing formal school as "just an excuse to meet kids and hang out with them," Erik was home-schooled by his father, who taught him an hour a day from home-school instruction manuals. His longest stint in formal schooling was a month in Miami Beach, where he stayed only because he developed a crush on a cute girl in his class. "Eventually it became clear that she wasn't interested in me, and so I left. Although we did get to dance once, and that was nice. She showed me how."
Most of his young life, however, Erik was free to pursue his own interests. He wrote his first computer program at age seven. It was a text-based CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE-style of game, set in his apartment complex. When his ambitions began to outpace his knowledge, his father suggested enrolling in math classes at Dalhousie University, and attended class right alongside him. Erik was twelve years old. "[It was] nothing particularly unusual, except that I was short for the first year. My fellow students were great and treated me like anyone else." But he shies away from the moniker "genius," a term most journalists jump to use. "I didn't show any sign of being particularly smart or anything, [except that I had] an unusually long attention span."
This is unusual in the age of short attention spans, which does not exclude people like me, who have the attention span of a hummingbird. Picking up a rippled shape like a Dali sombrero, I asked, "Is this the shape that might not exist?" referring to a previous interview.
"We're not sure it does, no."
"Well, shouldn't it exist, if I'm holding it?"
"Oh, that's just in the real world! In the mathematical world, we don't know." That is, the mathematical vocabulary for describing such a shape has not yet been called into being - and Erik may be just the one to do it. "I'm a mathematician, so most of the time I don't live in the real world. Therefore I'm not bound by things like physics! It's a great place to be because I can do whatever I want."
Mathematics is as much an act of creativity as an act of science. His field, which he helped found, is called computational origami. In other words, he develops the mathematics necessary to describe paper-folding. "Origami offers a wealth of intriguing geometry problems which have been a lot of fun to solve," he explains. Far from being an idle pastime, origami is key to understanding modern problems. For example, proteins constitute nearly everything in a living being. They both make up a cell's structure and carry out its work. Like a pipe cleaner bends, proteins begin as strings that assume intricate conformations that dictate their function. In other words, proteins are biochemical origami.
If a protein does not fold correctly, it cannot do its job; or worse, it does harm to the cell. "If we could solve these problems, we could design drugs that target particular viruses - and maybe cure diseases like Mad Cow that come from proteins misfolding."
Besides being a buoyant optimist, Erik is also a stalwart rationalist. "Ultimately, within this universe I can believe that [there's nothing science can't prove]. The closest thing to a God I can come is someone who creates the initial conditions for the universe and sets the rules. Conservation of energy, quantum physics - and then "Go!" The universe is on its own course. From [its] inception on to its destruction, it's a computer."
Rationalism, too, has its own built-in sense of awe. "I know things that no one can prove," says Erik, with a tone of reverence. Specifically, the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem "proves that there are things you can't prove - yet are true." Put another way, the Gödel Incompleteness Theorem states that, in every mathematical system, there are known truths that cannot be derived from the precepts of that system.
The beauty and joy of mathematics are so endemic to Erik's daily life that they inform how he behaves personally. An algorithm, for instance, is "like a cooking recipe, only for solving a problem." They're also useful to navigate personal affairs. "Logic is the obvious thing for understanding a problem and all the possible solutions, as opposed to being more emotional about the issue. I'?s very pleasing to be in an objective process. [When you] prove something, it's not like you can get upset when it's true!" Even though this approach serves him well, he admits sheepishly that it's "very geeky."
Increasingly, however, geek is chic in this era of globalism and technology. Like popular scientists Noam Chomsky and Stephen Pinker, Erik has also considered activism. He feels particularly strongly about banishing archaic copyright laws in the Information Age. "The whole notion of having information protected doesn't make sense. It's illegal to decode a DVD even though it's encrypted in a stupid way. These days, the purpose of copyright is to protect companies. But, fundamentally, information wants to be free."
Similarly unbounded, Erik isn't afraid of diving into new territory. He juggles, has taken hip hop dance classes ("very exhausting"), and dressed up as a Bearded Lady for an Improv Boston show, where he is a regular. "That was an accomplishment by itself. I got the high heels, the dress, the garter belts, the stockings - it was a real pain. I didn't have quite the right body type. [The dress] was lavender one-piece. It was pretty tight against my fake breasts."
Erik relishes defying what?s popular. As a child, he manifested this same tendency as stubbornness: "I used to not eat chocolate because it was too popular - therefore it couldn't be good!" Though he likes chocolate now and, also, popular math, he is particularly attracted to the most intractable problems. His latest venture took him into an esoteric subfield of graph theory, otherwise known as what Matt Damon was scrawling on the chalkboard in GOOD WILL HUNTING. In this subfield, about 20 papers have been published in the last 20 years, which, in scientific time, is a snail's pace. But Erik is eager to take it on. "You can find really interesting innovations that way," he says.
Constant collaboration is another way Erik innovates. On his right hand are sweat-blurred scrawls from ballpoint pens, mind-triggers known only to him: "Tom. Italy. Jenna. Summer. GREEN." And, faded from two days of showers, "Consistent histories proposal."
"It's one model of time travel, an alternative to the parallel worlds [hypothesis]," he explains. Recently, Erik spoke at the first (and, theoretically, only) Time Travelers' Convention, held on a cold, rainy night at MIT. The community was encouraged to leave notes on acid-free paper in obscure books, giving the exact time and geographic coordinates of the Convention, so that future humans could travel back to it in 2005. An open-spaced pen was roped off so that the travelers would not materialize into the trees.
Unfortunately, no one (that we know of) showed up, but that did nothing to dampen Erik's imagination. Explaining the parallel worlds (or "multiverse") hypothesis, which allows the solution of time travel paradoxes, he says, "The universe is flipping coins, and every time it flips a coin, it actually comes out both ways, and the universe branches. It happens all the time."
If this is true, untold millions of universes branch out of Erik?s office every day. As an assistant professor, his time is filled with meetings with graduate students, collaborators, colleagues, advisees, reporters, friends; classes taught and seminars attended; problems posed and problems solved; writing and reading and revising papers that will eventually be published in peer-reviewed journals. "One thing I try to practice doing is context switch from doing one thing to doing something completely different in two seconds. That's what I aspire to."
It sounds like the life of a workaholic. On the contrary, Erik makes no distinction between work and play. His work is his life's play, and he wouldn't have it any other way. "The thing that drives me is having fun. Right now I enjoy being a professor and I will be, probably, for several more years. [But] my goal in life is to keep having fun - that can go anywhere. I'll never retire."
In the background of his office is a stack of emergency food. Instant noodle bowls are piled next to a monstrous bag of beef jerky. "Whenever I eat it, I have this image of being in an adventure," he explained, smiling. For the average visitor, though, just a simple conversation feels like an adventure. Erik's territory is the infinite space of the mind, and he's only beginning to explore.
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