Demaine will give the free, public talk, “Geometric Puzzles: Algorithms and Complexity,” at 6:30 p.m. in Room 101, Strickler Hall. His talk is the annual Bullitt lecture sponsored by the UofL mathematics department.
The Bullitt family endowed the general-interest lecture series to honor former U.S. Solicitor General William Marshall Bullitt’s interest in mathematics.
Demaine’s research interests in problem-solving range from the geometry of how proteins fold to the data structures that improve web searches. He co-wrote the books “Games, Puzzles and Computation” about the computational complexity of games and “Geometric Folding Algorithms” about the theory of folding.
As a visual artist, he collaborates with his father in media including glass and paper sculpture. His curved-crease folded paper structures are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and he recently was featured in the “Between the Folds” documentary about the art and science of paper folding, or origami.
Demaine joined the MIT faculty in 2001 at age 20 and received a MacArthur fellowship in 2003.
