Invitation to "Algorithms Meet Art, Puzzles, and Magic" Seminar by Erik Demaine on 12 July 2010, 3pm @ NUS LT22

Thanks to loyal anonymous contributor for my blog. Do check out this session if you are interested.

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For those mathematically minded, and are in Singapore (or willing to head there) on July 12th.  :)  A wikipedia excerpt about Erik:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Demaine

Erik entered Dalhousie University in Canada at the age of 12, and completed his bachelor's degree when only 14 ... He joined the MIT faculty in 2001, at age 20, reportedly the youngest professor in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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The Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) Centre and the NUS Department of Mathematics would like to invite you to a seminar on....

 

 

Algorithms Meet Art, Puzzles, and Magic

By Erik Demaine

 

Abstract:

When I was six years old, my father Martin Demaine and I designed and made puzzles as the Erik and Dad Puzzle Company, which distributed to toy stores across Canada.  So began our journey into the interactions between algorithms and the arts (here, puzzle design).  More and more, we find that our mathematical research and artistic projects converge, with the artistic side inspiring the mathematical side and vice versa.  Mathematics itself is an art form, and through other media such as sculpture, puzzles, and magic, the beauty of mathematics can be brought to a wider 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 (such as the metapuzzle of how to solve a puzzle).  This talk will give several examples in each category, from how our first font design led to a universality result in hinged dissections, to how studying curved creases in origami led to sculptures at MoMA.  The audience will be expected to participate in some live magic demonstrations.

 

Biography:

Erik Demaine is Associate Professor in computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 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. He received a MacArthur Fellowship (2003) as a computational geometer tackling and solving difficult problems related to folding and bending, moving readily between the theoretical and the playful, with a keen eye to revealing the former in the latter. He co-authored with Joseph O'Rourke a book about the theory of folding, Geometric Folding Algorithms: Linkages, Origami, Polyhedra (Cambridge University Press, 2007). His interests span the connections between mathematics and art, particularly sculpture and performance, including curved origami sculptures in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

 

 

Date:  Monday, 12 July 2010

Time:  3:00pm – 4:00pm

Venue:  NUS Lecture Theatre 22

                Science Drive 2

RSVP by 28 June 2010, to events@smart.mit.edu

 

 

Warm regards,

 

Joyce Tan (Mrs.)
Secretary
M.I.T. Club of Singapore
Office: (65) 6312 9671  Fax: (65) 6343 8463
Mobile: (65) 9380 3004
Email: joycesuelee@alum.mit.edu