Erik Demaine,

Demaine, an assistant professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the leading theoretician in the emerging field of origami mathematics, the formal study of what can be done with a folded sheet of paper. He believes the form he is holding is a hyperbolic paraboloid, a shape well known to mathematicians ? Over the past few years he has published a series of landmark results about the theory of folded structures, including solutions to the longstanding ?single-cut? problem and the ?carpenter?s rule? problem.Robert Connelly, a mathematician at Cornell who worked with Demaine on the solution, noted by phone that the problem was a good deal subtler than it initially sounded. At first mathematicians thought all linkages could be unfolded, but during the 1990s they discovered a number of very clever arrangements that looked impossible to unfold.Aside from the mathematical value of the hyperbolic forms, Demaine has also taught courses in the school of architecture and imagines being able to computationally generate a scaffolding of these shapes over which a flexible skin could be draped.