Erik Demaine will be this year’s speaker of the Vienna Gödel Lecture on June 4th, 2014. Aged 20, he became the youngest professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structure for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games. He is especially interested in the connections between mathematics and art, and is actively involved in Origami arts.

Algorithms Meet Art

Since his early childhood days, Erik Demaine designed and did puzzles together with his father - they were distributed to toy shops across Canada. Looking deeper into the interactions between algorithms and art, he found his mathematical research and artistic projects converged: the creative side inspiring the mathematical side and vice versa. Mathematics itself is a form of art, and through other media such as sculpture, puzzles, and magic, the beauty of mathematics can be brought to a broader audience. These artistic endeavors also provide us with deeper insights into the underlying mathematics, by providing physical realizations of objects under consideration, by pointing to interesting special cases and directions to explore, and by suggesting new problems to solve. This talk will give several examples in each category, from how the first font design led to building transforming robots, to how studying curved creases in origami led to sculptures at MoMA. The audience will be expected to participate in some live magic demonstrations.

Program

17:30: Welcome Johannes Fröhlich, Vice Rector Research and Innovation, TU Wien, and Gerald Steinhardt, Dean Faculty of Informatics, TU Wien

17:45: Erik Demaine, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA: Meet Art, Puzzles, and Magic

Moderation: Stefan Szeider Institute of Information Systems, TU Wien Informatics

About

Erik D. Demaine is a professor of Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was born in Canada. Demaine joined the faculty of the MIT in 2001 at age 20, reportedly the youngest professor in its history. He was promoted to full professorship in 2011. Demaine’s research interests range throughout algorithms, from data structures for improving web searches to the geometry of understanding how proteins fold to the computational difficulty of playing games.

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