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 He worked at the Lincoln Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) building computers from 1953 through 1958. In 1964, he left electronics to start building canoes and other boats. He and his family moved to a farm in Lincoln, Massachusetts.

Work

Coffin began creating puzzles in 1968, after quitting the design and manufacture of canoes and kayaks. One of the puzzles he created, made of 12 hexagonal sticks and cast in epoxy, was brought to school by one of his three daughters. and then manufactured by 3M. When they were manufactured, the design was so complex that factory workers were unable to assemble them. Some have been commercially produced, such as the Hectix. 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. Jerry Slocum, the founder of the International Puzzle Party, has called Coffin's puzzles "beautiful three-dimensional sculptures." In 2006, he won the Nob Yoshigahara Award for his lifetime contribution to creating mechanical puzzles.

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:

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.