A leading figure in the early development of computer-based automatic indexing and information retrieval and one of the founders of academic computer science in the 1960s, DeMaine was born in South Africa and took his B.Sc in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Witwatersrand in 1948. He completed his Ph.D. in physical chemistry at the University of British Columbia.
During his career, he worked in the United States for the National Bureau of Standards, the Ballistic Missile Defense Advanced Technology Center, and on the campuses of SUNY Albany, University of Mississippi, University of Illinois, UC Santa Barbara, The Pennsylvania State University, and Auburn University.
He was the author of 1 patent, two books, and more than 200 published scientific research articles and reports in chemistry, computational chemistry, and computer science. His fields of research included spectroscopy, charge transfer complexes, solution theory, data compression, information retrieval, human-machine interfaces, expert systems, and systems for detecting and correcting computational errors.
