Professor
at
the
Massachusetts
Institute
of
Technology
2015
Young
Alumni
Achievement
Medal
Winner
Erik
Demaine,
a
child
prodigy,
was
admitted
to
the
University
of
Waterloo
at
the
age
of
14
as
a
Graduate
student
in
the
David
Cherition
School
of
Computer
Science.
He
wrote
his
first
computer
program
at
the
age
of
seven.
By
the
time
Demaine
completed
his
PhD
in
2002
he
had
already
collaborated
with
90
co-authors,
and
written
80
papers
on
topics
as
various
as
the
mathematics
of
paper
folding,
cache
efficient
data
structures,
and
distributed
computing.
Demaine
began
teaching
at
MIT
at
the
age
of
twenty,
reportedly
the
youngest
professor
in
the
history
of
the
institution.
Demaine
has
made
outstanding
contributions
in
several
fields
of
algorithms,
namely
computational
geometry,
data
structures,
graph
algorithms
and
recreational
algorithms.
In
computational
geometry
and
data
structures
he
has
solved
or
made
significant
progress
on
classic
problems
such
as
the
carpenter’s
rule
problem,
the
hinged-dissection
problem,
the
prefix-sum
problem,
and
the
dynamic
optimality
conjecture.
