Jerrek
10-10-2003, 19:17
UW grad wins "Genius" award, $500,000 US
(UW = University of Waterloo, my school)
A 22-year-old UW graduate turned MIT professor has just received $500,000 US to spend over the next five years in any way he sees fit - no strings attached.
"Whiz kid" Erik Demaine has been named the youngest of this year's 24 MacArthur Fellows, a prestigious group of creative geniuses whose former recipients include literary theorists Harold Bloom and Susan Sontag, as well as biologist Stephen Jay Gould and writer Thomas Pynchon.
Also known as the Genius Awards, the MacArthur Fellowships are part of an American funding honour that celebrates "distinctly bold and original" work in disciplines ranging from literature to biomedical engineering. Demaine's long list of achievements in abstract geometry earned him this esteemed honour, as well as its sizeable purse.
Demaine was home-schooled by his father in his native city of Halifax before he was admitted to Dalhousie University at the age of 12. He joined UW's faculty of mathematics at age 14 and left six years later with a PhD in computer science.
At age 20, Demaine became the youngest professor ever hired at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he currently teaches computer science and continues his own research in recreational mathematics and computational geometry.
(emphasis added)
http://imprint.uwaterloo.ca/story.php?f=2&t=3703&i=&v=f&story=3703
Heh. Smart kid.
(UW = University of Waterloo, my school)
A 22-year-old UW graduate turned MIT professor has just received $500,000 US to spend over the next five years in any way he sees fit - no strings attached.
"Whiz kid" Erik Demaine has been named the youngest of this year's 24 MacArthur Fellows, a prestigious group of creative geniuses whose former recipients include literary theorists Harold Bloom and Susan Sontag, as well as biologist Stephen Jay Gould and writer Thomas Pynchon.
Also known as the Genius Awards, the MacArthur Fellowships are part of an American funding honour that celebrates "distinctly bold and original" work in disciplines ranging from literature to biomedical engineering. Demaine's long list of achievements in abstract geometry earned him this esteemed honour, as well as its sizeable purse.
Demaine was home-schooled by his father in his native city of Halifax before he was admitted to Dalhousie University at the age of 12. He joined UW's faculty of mathematics at age 14 and left six years later with a PhD in computer science.
At age 20, Demaine became the youngest professor ever hired at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he currently teaches computer science and continues his own research in recreational mathematics and computational geometry.
(emphasis added)
http://imprint.uwaterloo.ca/story.php?f=2&t=3703&i=&v=f&story=3703
Heh. Smart kid.