When Erik Demaine tackles a new math problem, he starts by folding paper. That’s because Demaine, 24-years-old and MIT’s youngest-ever professor, is in the small but active field of computational origami, now finding applications for everything from airbags to medicine. His current effort: describing the protein-folding that causes mad cow disease. “For the hard problems, it’s necessary to build the right intuition by playing with physical models,” he says. You might say he's folding his way into the future. —CM

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