Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 - (Page 18)

D09LEAD_p1ds.qxp 7/11/08 11:48 AM Page 18 Strategic Vision A CONVERSATION WITH ERIK DEMAINE digital, 13 or so different knot types, there’s color information, other things like the handedness of the knot. How would you encode information into that thing and how do we extract information from it? Unlike the mathematical things I do, this is not exactly a well-posed problem. DDJ: Are you very visual? ED: Yes. I use visualization a lot, of course in geometry, but in everything else I study. I visualize what ought to be true intuitively and then try to prove it’s true. But I also learn from listening. I learn a lot from other people and what they do and what their tools are, and what they’re experiencing. I learned to read early, but it never was as interesting to me as personal experience. I didn’t read textbooks as an undergrad. My father, Martin Demaine, had homeschooled me until I went to university, he was against the whole school thing, wanted to be engaged in my education. Also, my father wanted to travel, so around Grade 2 we started traveling around North America, Canada and the United States both. I got to see a lot of different culture, meet lots of different kinds of people, different background, different ages… My father and I still work together on mathematical and visual things. His background is in the visual arts. He pulled me into the arts and I pulled him into the mathematical stuff. We have some joint sculptures at MOMA right now as part of the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibit. DDJ: So tell us about how all this beautiful art resulted from your work in geometry. ED: It started for me with the fold-and-onecut problem. You take a piece of paper and fold it as many times you like, then you take your scissors and make one complete, straight cut. Then you unfold the pieces and see what you get. What shapes can you make? Before he was an escape artist, Harry Houdini would do a trick where he folded and made one cut and out came a regular five-pointed star. The general mathemati- cal question was posed by Martin Gardner—my dad and I are great fans of Gardner, we were just at the Gathering for Gardner. In the 1960s, Gardner asked, “What is the limit?” This was the first geometric problem I worked on, with my dad and my adviser Anna Lubiw. We proved that everything is possible, any polygon, any shape made of straight lines, it’s possible to make arbitrarily many pieces of arbitrary shapes with folding and one straight cut. You need some pretty complicated folds, but there’s an algorithm that says, “If you want that shape, here’s how you fold the paper.” It’s all on my Folding and Unfolding page (erikdemaine.org/folding). DDJ: Not only do you tackle the Secrets of Life, but you also fold paper, and children can understand this! ED: That’s what I like about this. The problems I work on are pretty accessible. The solutions are hard, and that’s what keeps the customers happy and pays the bills. DDJ Download a proven, cross-platform database alternative • Unmatched performance in enterprise systems, desktop deployments, and embedded devices for over 25 years. • Simplified framework for rapid development of data-driven applications including graphical tools to speed your development and monitor critical metrics of the database engine. • Free development and free deployment in non-commercial environments. • Flexibility to use ISAM and SQL API’s within the same application. • Sophisticated feature set including 64-bit support, memory files, ADO.NET, LINQ, C#, VCL, and dbExpress. • Cross Platform support including Windows, UNIX, Linux, Mac OS X, and more. • OEM Database Engine simplifies your deployment with a single executable and flexible licensing options. Prove it to yourself in six minutes. 18 Download today! www.faircom.com Dr. Dobb’s Journal l www.ddj.com l September 2008 http://erikdemaine.org/folding http://www.faircom.com http://www.faircom.com http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook A Conversation With Erik Demaine Application Lifecycle Management Meets Model-Driven Development Building a Robust Development Environment Real Users Really Matter Matching Wildcards: An Algorithm The Android Mobile Phone Platform Managing Application Thread Use Signalling Integer Overflows in Java .NET Development & the IBM WebSphere Portal Server The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

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