text: Demaine was a fan of Martin Gardner and in 2001 he teamed up with his father Martin Demaine and Gathering 4 Gardner founder Tom M. Rodgers to edit a tribute book for Gardner on his 90th birthday.  From 2016 to 2020 he was president of the board of directors of Gathering 4 Gardner.
  Honours and awards
  In 2003, Demaine was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, known colloquially as the "genius grant".
  In 2013, Demaine received the EATCS Presburger Award for young scientists. The award citation listed accomplishments including his work on the carpenter's rule problem, hinged dissection, prefix sum data structures, competitive analysis of binary search trees, graph minors, and computational origami. That same year, he was awarded a fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
  For his work on bidimensionality, he was the winner of the Nerode Prize in 2015 along with his co-authors Fedor Fomin, Mohammad T. Hajiaghayi, and Dimitrios Thilikos. The work was the study of a general technique for developing both fixed-parameter tractable exact algorithms and approximation algorithms for a class of algorithmic problems on graphs.
  In 2016, he became a fellow at the Association for Computing Machinery. He was given an honorary doctorate by Bard College in 2017.