Erik Demaine's Academic Family

Co-authors

Current Students & Postdocs

Current postdocs:

• Adam Hesterberg

Current PhD students:

• Josh Brunner
• Michael Coulombe
• Yevhenii Diomidov
• Dylan Hendrickson
• Klara Mundilova

Current Master's students:

Past Students & Postdocs

Past postdocs:

• Jason Ku (2016–2017, now a Lecturer in EECS at MIT)
• Christian Sommer (2011–2012, now at Apple)
• Siamak Tazari (2011)
• André Schulz (2009–2010, now a professor at University of Münster)
• MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi (joint with CMU, 2005–2007, now a Professor at University of Maryland)

Completed PhD students:

• Quanquan Liu (cosupervised with Julian Shun, now a post-doc at MIT)
  Thesis: Scalable and Efficient Graph Algorithms and Analysis Techniques for Modern Machines (2021)
• Jayson Lynch (now a post-doc at University of Waterloo)
  Thesis: A Framework for Proving the Computational Intractability of Motion Planning Problems (2020)
• Jeffrey Bosboom
  Thesis: Exhaustive Search and Hardness Proofs for Games (2020)
• Ali Vakilian (cosupervised with Piotr Indyk, now a post-doc at U. Wisconsin Madison)
  Thesis: New Directions in Streaming Algorithms (2019)
• Hugo Akitaya (Tufts, cosupervised with Diane Souvaine, now a postdoc at Carleton University)
  Thesis: Recognizing Weak Embeddings (2018)
• Adam Hesterberg (now a postdoc at MIT)
  Thesis: Closed Quasigeodesics, Escaping from Polygons, and Conflict-Free Graph Coloring (2018)
• Zachary Abel (now a Lecturer in EECS at MIT)
  Thesis: On Folding and Unfolding with Linkages and Origami (2016)
• Jason Ku (cosupervised with Sanjay Sarma, now a lecturer in EECS at MIT)
  Thesis: On the Design of Physical Folded Structures (2016)
• Duks Koschitz (now an Associate Professor at Pratt)
  Thesis: Computational Design with Curved Creases: David Huffman's Approach to Paperfolding (2014)
• Andrew Winslow (Tufts, cosupervised with Diane Souvaine, now at YouTube)
  Thesis: Staged Self-Assembly and Polyomino Context-Free Grammars (2014)
• Morteza Zadimoghaddam (now at Google Boston)
  Thesis: Online Allocation Algorithms with Applications in Computational Advertising (2014)
• Nadia Benbernou (now at Google Boston)
  Thesis: Geometric Algorithms for Reconfigurable Structures (2011)
• Jelani Nelson (cosupervised with Piotr Indyk, now a Professor at Berkeley)
  Thesis: Sketching and Streaming High-Dimensional Vectors (2011, winner of MIT EECS Sprowls Award)
• Oren Weimann (now a Postdoctoral Fellow at Weizmann Institute of Science)
  Thesis: Accelerating Dynamic Programming (2009)
• Mihai Pătraşcu (now sadly deceased)
  Thesis: Lower Bound Techniques for Data Structures (2008)
• Dion Harmon (now at New England Complex Systems Institute)
  Thesis: New Bounds on Optimal Binary Search Trees (2006)
• Bob Hearn (cosupervised with Gerald Sussman, now a Visiting Research Scholar at Dartmouth College)
  Thesis: Games, Puzzles, and Computation (2006)
• MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi (now an Associate Professor at University of Maryland)
  Thesis: The Bidimensionality Theory and Its Algorithmic Applications (2005)
• Nicole Immorlica (cosupervised with David Karger, now a researcher at Microsoft Research New England)
  Thesis: Computing with Strategic Agents (2005)
• David Liben-Nowell (now an Assistant Professor at Carleton College)
  Thesis: An Algorithmic Approach to Social Networks (2005)

Completed Master's students:

• Dylan Hendrickson
  Thesis: Gadgets and Gizmos: A Formal Model of Simulation in the Gadget Framework for Motion Planning (2021)
• Josh Brunner
  Thesis: Subway Shuffle, 1 × 1 Rush Hour, and Cooperative Chess Puzzles: Computational Complexity of Puzzles (2021)
• Ivan Tadeu Ferreira Antunes Filho
  Thesis: Characterizing Boolean Satisfiability Variants (2019)
• Ray Hua Wu
  Thesis: Complexity of Minesweeper with Restricted Number Sets (2018)
• Kai Xiao (now a PhD student at MIT)
  Thesis: Cookie Clicker (2018)
• Mikhail Rudoy (now at Google New York)
  Thesis: Hamiltonian Cycle and Related Problems: Vertex-Breaking, Grid Graphs, and Rubik's Cubes (2017)
• Quanquan Liu (now a PhD student at MIT)
  Thesis: Red-Blue and Standard Pebble Games: Complexity and Applications in the Sequential and Parallel Model (2017)
• Jayson Lynch (now a PhD student at MIT)
  Thesis: On the Computational Complexity of Portal and Push-Pull Block Puzzles (2015)
• Andrea Lincoln (now a PhD student at MIT)
  Thesis: Analysis of Recursive Cache-Adaptive Algorithms (2014)
• Yanping Chen
  Thesis: Edge-Unfolding Almost-Flat Convex Polyhedral Terrains (2013)
• Kimberly Baldauf
  Thesis: A User Interface for Customizing Cane Layouts in Virtual Glass (2012)
• Tom Morgan (now a PhD student at Harvard)
  Thesis: Map Folding (2012)
• Aviv Ovadya
  Thesis: Origami Transformers: Folding Orthogonal Structures from Universal Hinge Patterns (2010)
• Timothy Abbott (now at Zulip)
  Thesis: Generalizations of Kempe's Universality Theorem (2008)
• Katherine Lai (now at DeepMind)
  Thesis: Complexity of Union-Split-Find Problems (2008)
• Greg Price (now at Dropbox)
  Thesis: A Pseudopolynomial Algorithm for Alexandrov's Theorem (2008)
• Ilya Baran (now at Onshape)
  Thesis: Adaptive Algorithms for Problems Involving Black-Box Lipschitz Functions (2004)

Ancestors

Erik D. Demaine, PhD, University of Waterloo, 2001
 ├ Anna Lubiw, PhD, University of Toronto, 1986
 │ ├ Rudolf A. Mathon, PhD, University of Toronto, 1972
 │ │ └ Robert Laurence Johnston, PhD, Case Western Reserve University, 1965
 │ │   └ Richard Steven Varga, PhD, Harvard University, 1954
 │ │     ├ Joseph Leonard Walsh, PhD, Harvard University, 1920
 │ │     │ └ Maxime Bôcher, PhD, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, 1891
 │ │     │   └ Christian Felix Klein, PhD, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 1868
 │ │     │     ├ Julius Plücker, PhD, Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1823
 │ │     │     │ └ Christian Ludwig Gerling, PhD, Universität Göttingen, 1812
 │ │     │     │   └ Carl Friedrich Gauss, PhD, Universität Helmstedt, 1799
 │ │     │     └ Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz, PhD, Universität Berlin, 1853
 │ │     │       ├ Gustav Dirichlet, Honorary Universität Bonn, 1827
 │ │     │       │ ├ Simeon Denis Poisson, PhD, École Polytechnique, ?
 │ │     │       │ │ └ same advisor as Fourier:
 │ │     │       │ └ Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, PhD
 │ │     │       │   └ Joseph Louis Lagrange, no degree
 │ │     │       │     └ Leonhard Euler, PhD, Universität Basel, 1726
 │ │     │       │       └ Johann Bernoulli, PhD, 1694
 │ │     │       │         └ Jacob Bernoulli, ?
 │ │     │       │           └ Gottfried Leibniz, PhD, Universität Altdorf, 1666
 │ │     │       │             └ Erhard Weigel, PhD, Universität Leipzig, 1650
 │ │     │       └ Martin Ohm, PhD, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1811
 │ │     │         └ Karl Christian von Langsdorf, PhD, Universität Erfurt, 1781
 │ │     └ George David Birkhoff, PhD, The University of Chicago, 1907
 │ │       └ Eliakim Hastings Moore, PhD, Yale University, 1885
 │ │         └ Hubert Anson Newton, BS, Yale University, 1850
 │ │           └ Michel Chasles, PhD, École Polytechnique, 1814
 │ │             └ Simeon Denis Poisson, PhD, École Polytechnique, ?
 │ │               └ Joseph Louis Lagrange, no degree
 │ │                 └ Leonhard Euler, PhD, Universität Basel, 1726
 │ │                   └ Johann Bernoulli, PhD, 1694
 │ │                     └ Jacob Bernoulli, ?
 │ │                       └ Gottfried Leibniz, PhD, Universität Altdorf, 1666
 │ │                         └ Erhard Weigel, PhD, Universität Leipzig, 1650
 │ └ Stephen Cook, PhD, Harvard, 1966
 │   └ Hao Wang, PhD, Harvard, 1948
 │     └ Willard Quine, PhD, Harvard, 1932
 │       └ Alfred Whitehead, PhD, University of Cambridge, 1884
 └ J. Ian Munro, PhD, University of Toronto, 1971
   └ Allan Borodin, PhD, Cornell University, 1969
     └ Juris Hartmanis, PhD, Caltech, 1955
       └ Robert Palmer Dilworth, PhD, Caltech, 1939
         └ Morgan Ward, PhD, Caltech, 1928
           └ Eric Temple Bell, PhD, Columbia University, 1912
             └ Frank Nelson Cole, PhD, Harvard, 1886
               └ Christian Felix Klein, PhD, Universität Bonn, 1868
                 ├ Julius Plücker, PhD, Philipps-Universität Marburg, 1823
                 │ └ Christian Ludwig Gerling, PhD, Universität Göttingen, 1812
                 │   └ Carl Friedrich Gauss, PhD, Universität Helmstedt, 1799
                 └ Rudolf Otto Sigismund Lipschitz, PhD, Universität Berlin, 1853
                   ├ Gustav Dirichlet, Honorary Universität Bonn, 1827
                   │ ├ Simeon Denis Poisson, PhD, École Polytechnique, ?
                   │ │ └ same advisor as Fourier:
                   │ └ Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier, PhD
                   │   └ Joseph Louis Lagrange, no degree
                   │     └ Leonhard Euler, PhD, Universität Basel, 1726
                   │       └ Johann Bernoulli, PhD, 1694
                   │         └ Jacob Bernoulli, ?
                   │           └ Gottfried Leibniz, PhD, Universität Altdorf, 1666
                   │             └ Erhard Weigel, PhD, Universität Leipzig, 1650
                   └ Martin Ohm, PhD, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, 1811
                     └ Karl Christian von Langsdorf, PhD, Universität Erfurt, 1781

Thanks to The Mathematics Genealogy Project for providing most of this information, and to Nick Harvey for collecting it together.