Erik Demaine
Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Active 1996–2026
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About
Erik Demaine is a professor associated with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT. His research focuses on the theory and practice of algorithms, encompassing idealized mathematical procedures and the computer systems deployed by major tech companies to handle billions of user requests per day. His work involves leveraging computational, theoretical, and experimental tools to develop groundbreaking sensors, energy transducers, new physical substrates for computation, and systems that address shared human challenges. He is involved in the exploration of various research areas within electrical engineering and computer science, including algorithms, systems, and the intersection of artificial intelligence with decision-making. His contributions are integral to advancing understanding in these fields, contributing to the development of innovative computational techniques and systems.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- Mathematics
- Geometry
- Combinatorics
- Physics
- Discrete mathematics
Selected publications
Nature Communications · 2021-03-02 · 33 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorAbstract Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with “letterlocking,” a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present…
Universal hinge patterns for folding strips efficiently into any grid polyhedron
Computational Geometry · 2020-03-03 · 6 citations
articleOpen accessCorrespondingWho witnesses The Witness? Finding witnesses in The Witness is hard and sometimes impossible
Theoretical Computer Science · 2 citations
We analyze the computational complexity of the many types of pencil-and-paper-style puzzles featured in the 2016 puzzle video game The Witness. In all puzzles, the goal is to draw a simple path in a rectangular grid graph from a start vertex to a destination vertex. The different puzzle types place different constraints on the path: preventing some edges from being visited (broken edges); forcing some edges or vertices to be visited (hexagons); forcing some cells to have certain numbers of incid…
Lecture notes in mechanical engineering · 2026-01-01
book-chapterA Novel Reduction from #SAT to #2SAT Based on Symmetry: <i>Simply Drop the Large Clauses</i>
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks · 2026-01-01
book-chapterThe counting problem #2sat is complete for #P under Turing (many-call) reductions, which dates back to the seminal work by Valiant from 1979. Arguably, this reduction is the opposite from being simple as it is a sophisticated chain of transformation from #sat, via several variations of the problem of computing the permanent, to the task of counting matchings in graphs, and then finally to #2sat. In contrast, we give a simple reduction that makes only two calls instead of polynomially many calls.…
Recent grants
Frequent coauthors
- 292 shared
Martin L. Demaine
- 112 shared
Stefan Langerman
- 104 shared
Jayson Lynch
- 103 shared
Joseph O’Rourke
Smith College
- 83 shared
Daniela Tulone
Joint Research Centre
- 79 shared
Adam Hesterberg
- 77 shared
Ryuhei Uehara
- 71 shared
Sándor P. Fekete
Technische Universität Braunschweig
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