Stewart Coffin

Stewart Coffin is an American puzzle maker. According to Ars Technica, he is considered to be one of the "best designers of polyhedral interlocking puzzles in the world."

Biography

Coffin majored in electrical engineering in college and worked at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) building computers in the 1950s. In 1964, he left MIT to start building canoes and other boats. He and his family moved to a farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Coffin currently lives in Andover, Massachusetts, where he moved to in 1998. He has three daughters, all of whom are very good at solving his puzzles.

Work

Coffin began creating puzzles in 1968, after growing tired of designing and manufacturing fiberglass boats, such as canoes. One of the puzzles he created, made of 12 triangular sticks and cast in epoxy, was brought to school by one of his three daughters. This event led to Coffin meeting Thomas Atwater who was a business agent for inventors of games and puzzles. When 3M showed an interest in his work, he decided to quit making boats and concentrate on puzzles. Hectix, one of his designs, was patented in the United States in 1973 and then manufactured by 3M. When they were manufactured, the design was so complex that factory workers were unable to assemble them. The parts were shipped to his house where he, his daughters and neighborhood children all put them together, making 20,000 puzzles in two weeks.

Later, Coffin stopped patenting his puzzles because he did not feel he could make a living by designing products for mass production. Instead he turned to woodworking and selling his puzzles as an art or a craft.

Coffin has designed more than 140 original puzzles, most of which are polyhedral. Some have been commercially produced, such as the Hectix. Many of his designs are carved in wood, some of which use exotic woods such as cocobolo, bubinga and rosewood. In creating his wooden puzzles, Coffin selects beautiful types of wood, cuts and glues the work and then adds his own finish to the piece. Coffin has had no formal training in puzzle making and designs his works intuitively.

Coffin's puzzles have several rules, including that each piece be dissimilar, have different axes of symmetry and only one solution. He has freely shared his designs for reproduction, making his puzzles widely produced and sold internationally.

Coffin has called his work "ApArt," or "the art that comes apart" and he feels that the "ultimate object in puzzle design is amusement." Curator, Amy Slocum, has highlighted the artistic effort that Coffin puts into his work when she exhibited several pieces at the Katonah Museum of Art. Jerry Slocum, the founder of the International Puzzle Party, has called Coffin's puzzles "beautiful three-dimensional sculptures."

In 2000, Coffin was the winner of the Sam Loyd award. In 2006, he won the Nob Yoshigahara Award.

In 2007, Coffin spoke at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, where he discussed his puzzle making and demonstrated his puzzles.

Books

He is the author of several books and articles about puzzles, puzzle design and memoirs of his life:

• Puzzle Craft. Stewart T. Coffin, Lincoln, Massachusetts 1985, OCLC 8262551. 
• The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections. Oxford University Press, New York 1990, ISBN 978-0-19-853207-1. 
• , with Jerry Slocum: AP-Art: A Compendium of Puzzle Designs. Puzzle World Producations, Oregonia, Ohio 2003, ISBN 978-0-9666361-2-3. 
• , with Jerry Slocum and edited by Jong-Seon No and Hong-Yeop Song: Mathematical Properties of Sequences and Other Combinatorial Structures. Kluwer Academic Publishers, New York 2003, ISBN 978-1-4615-0304-0, What's New in Polyomino Puzzles and Their Design (google.com [abgerufen am 14. Juli 2015]). 
• , with Jerry Slocum: Tall Trees and Wild Bees: Memories of Childhood That Never Really Ended. Collective Copies, Amherst, Massachusetts 2006, ISBN 978-0-9770454-0-2. 
• Geometric Puzzle Design. 2nd Auflage. A K Peters, Ltd, Wellesley, Massachusetts 2007, ISBN 978-1-56881-312-7. 
• Black Spruce Journals: Tales of Canoe-Tripping in the Maine Woods, the Boreal Spruce Forests of Northern Canada and the Barren Grounds. Heron Dance Press, 2007, ISBN 978-1-933937-40-3. 
• Tipcart Tales. Collective Copies, Amherst, Massachusetts 2007, ISBN 978-0-9770454-2-6. 
• AP-ART, A Compendium of Geometric Puzzles (2014)

Excerpts

The Universal Book of Mathematics provides the following information about him:

A leading designer of mechanical puzzles. He is also the author of The Puzzling World of Polyhedral Dissections, one of the most significant works produced on this subject.

External links

• Stewart Coffin's Puzzles