Not my usual fare, but interesting, as a single dad myself..

Road scholar finds home at MIT

Origami whiz learned from his nomad dad

By Ellen Barry, Globe Staff, 2/17/2002

Erik Demaine quit school at the age of 7.

If you had run into him a dozen years ago, it might have been in a bus station somewhere between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Miami Beach, on the road with his father, a silversmith and glassblower whose only degree was from Medford High School.

And yet, there he was on Friday, lecturing a roomful of scientists on his obscure specialty: computational origami. Demaine, at 20, arrived in the fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with the rank of assistant professor - one of the youngest the university has ever hired.

But the thing that is truly unusual about Demaine is the story of the path he took to get there - and of his father, Martin Demaine, who has devoted much of his adult life to educating Erik in a decidedly unorthodox way. Raised among hippies and jugglers and free thinkers, Erik Demaine has found himself at the center of a field where abstract math somehow intersects with street performance. That he is a prodigy is not even a question, say people who have worked with him; the question is what will amuse him.

''I think the sky is the limit,'' said Anna Lubiw, a professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario who has coauthored papers with Erik since he was 15 years old. ''I don't know anybody else like him, never mind young. To try to assume anything on the basis of what other people have done is nonsense.''

These days, it would be hard to pick out Erik and Martin Demaine at MIT's computer science department, where they both took offices last September - Erik on the second floor as an assistant professor, his father on the third as an unpaid visiting scholar, which Erik said was an incentive, although not a condition, of his choice to come here.

But eight years ago, when the father and son walked into the computer science department of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, they seemed to have emerged from nowhere. ''His dad and he walked into our department and just said he wants to join the university,'' said Sampalli Srinivas, an associate professor.

Administrators looked at them like they were crazy. Erik was 12 years old, he had no board scores, and no high school diploma. But they allowed Erik to take advanced courses in abstract algebra and programming languages. The result was clear by the end of the term: ''He aced every single course,'' Srinivas said. ''I recognized him as one of the brightest students I had.''

Over the next few years, a growing number of Canadian academics heard the story of Erik's migratory education. It was a project that kept father and son on the road for five years, eating $1 meals in rented rooms, and strolling into prestigious universities to talk to professors.

And it rested on a risky assumption about the academic world: That If you called up a professor and said your son had some questions about his work, that professor would invite you in, and start teaching.

''People always seemed curious to meet us,'' said Martin Demaine, 58. ''Then I would tell his age. I think there certainly was some mystery about us that we allowed to exist.''

For the first years of Erik's life, the Demaines lived more or less by the rules in Halifax, with Martin working long hours as a silversmith and Erik enrolled in Montessori school, Martin said. But after a painful divorce - neither father nor son was willing to talk about it on the record - Martin came to the realization, as he puts it, that ''I didn't know how to bring up a child.''

So Martin threw himself into it the way he had thrown himself into glassblowing, silversmithing, puzzlemaking, and filmmaking, among various other pursuits. He fired the nanny and came up with a plan: They would live on $5,000 a year. They would travel by bus, support themselves with craft shows and the proceeds of the ''Erik & Dad Puzzle Co.,'' and attempt to feed themselves on a budget of $1 per meal per person (a goal Martin admits sheepishly now they did not always achieve). Martin would work as little as possible.

The father's educational theory went like this: Apart from one hour of home schooling a day, the child should pursue his own interests. They spent a few weeks at a commune in Tennessee, a year in Providence, six months in Chicago. During a three-year stint in Miami Beach, he sat Erik down with a neighbor to see if he was interested in learning Chinese; the language instruction went nowhere, but the neighbor had a computer.

They borrowed missionary textbooks from a group of Seventh-day Adventists. Martin Demaine can remember three bookstores where the staff became so accustomed to seeing the Demaines poring through their merchandise that they set up tables as a study area for the two.

''We would go to a museum,'' Demaine said. ''Anything he pointed to or mentioned, I'd go to the library and find a book and leave it on the table. Sometimes after three days the books would disappear.''

The result, according to Erik Demaine, is that he pursued his own interests, circumventing years of cramming for tests and memorizing facts. ''Memorization is not such a big deal. You remember what you need to remember and look the rest up,'' he said.

His father insisted that he try school regularly, ''To make sure,'' Erik Demaine said.

''In Miami Beach, I went to school for a month because there was this cute girl,'' he said. ''It was a fine experience, but it was a much, much slower pace than I was used to.''

Erik understands why people put such an emphasis on studying for tests: ''You need grades so you can do something you want to do afterward. You need to take the tests to get the grades to apply to graduate school.''

But none of that ever applied to him. At 9, Erik took over the home-schooling teacher's manual and began teaching himself.

At Dalhousie, and then at the University of Waterloo, the Demaines made an unusual pair, the gangly teenager and his ponytailed father sitting together in class. ''The thing that really struck me was the way his dad motivated him,'' said Srinivas. ''When Erik was sick and felt under the weather, his dad used to attend my lecture and make a tape.''

And Martin Demaine, who had made forays into physics and law graduate programs but had never finished a college degree, began to hear people describe his son as a prodigy. ''To be honest, I just thought he was above average,'' he said.

They continued to work together, though, as Erik's interests wandered from tectonic plates to liquid dynamics to parallel computing systems. It was Martin, with his background in the visual arts, who introduced his son and his professors to the ancient Japanese art of folding paper.

Long the exclusive terrain of a few researchers, origami math has woken up slowly in recent years as researchers began to apply it to a lengthening list of real-world applications: to the folding of proteins in human DNA, or the unfolding of enormous lenses in orbiting space telescopes, or the folding of air bags in automobiles.

Erik also became interested in the study of linkage, the dynamics of rigid-sided polygons in two dimensions. Last year, with the help of mathematicians Robert Connelly and Gunther Rote, he solved the infamous ''Carpenter's Ruler'' problem, which had stymied scientists since the 1960s, proving that any such polygon can be unraveled without breaking - work that would be relevant to the fields of robotics and genetics.

By last year, when he interviewed at Stanford, New York University, and Carnegie Mellon, Erik was a coveted hire. Leigh Deacon, from her desk in MIT's computer science department, watched the hiring process with fascination. ''I said, unless this man has a third eye, everybody's going to want him,'' Deacon said.

The news that he had accepted and that she would be working as his administrative assistant made her more than a little anxious. She had already spent too much time around geniuses, enough to know that ''almost none of them know how to behave with other humans.''

''I thought to myself, what am I going to get? The most arrogant, egotistical person on the planet? Am I going to get someone just short of insane? There's got to be something wrong with him to compensate for his brilliance,'' said Deacon. ''I was just shocked ... He has this sort of quiet humility. He's got this nice expression on his face.''

Then there was the strange business of his father accompanying him. It's an unusual arrangement, agreed one colleague, but it's worked so far.

''Anyone who takes the time to know what Erik is about would know that separating him from his father would be a bad idea,'' said Thomas Hull, an assistant professor at Merrimack College who has conducted research with the Demaines on origami.

Lubiw, who was one of Erik's thesis advisers, said there is no question that the Demaines' work is a function of synergy. ''Even me, I can't tell what is his gift, what is his obsession, and what is his hard work,'' said Lubiw. ''I do take moral lessons for the way Marty raised him.''

At 20, Erik is nearly out of prodigy age range, and his lanky 6-foot-3-inch frame makes his age barely detectable anyway. He will explain, with a sweet smile, that our society is far too age- segregated: ''It is my single passive political stance,'' he said - and argues that a lot of other people could do what he does if they had the same encouragement.

In the Waterloo department that was home to this strange duo until last fall, there is a twinge of regret at their departure. But Ian Munro, Erik's thesis adviser, said he is just glad they came in the first place.

''You don't regret things like that happening to you,'' said Munro. ''You think: It was great to have Erik as a student.''

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002

Answers

Fascinating article, Carl.

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002

Actually, I didn't read this one, but if I did I would say it was certainly not a Carl story and someone is playing jokes....:>). If I had read it, it would have been wonderful and fascinating.

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002

I pretended I posted it so I could read it. Good stuff.

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002

This story reminds me of a sci-fi book I read years ago, although I can't remember the author or the title. The story involved taking a group of children, and allowing them free access to whatever happened to interest them, immediately providing answers to any question in whatever detail they desired. They also had trained "parent's", although the parent's where not assigned to a particular child, but provided love and support to whatever child happened to need it. They children eventually developed into super humans, using virtually all of their capabilities.

I liked his comment The result, according to Erik Demaine, is that he pursued his own interests, circumventing years of cramming for tests and memorizing facts. ''Memorization is not such a big deal. You remember what you need to remember and look the rest up,'' he said.

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002

Can you imagine trying to raise such a child?

I think my son is way above average for his age group, but I can't see putting him on a "self study".

All I can say is WOW!

-- Anonymous, February 18, 2002