Shortcut back to Vee-21 Puzzle creator: Oriel Maximé


Oriel Maximé Oriel is your classic, all-around math geek. He has a degree in Applied Mathematics from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and greatly enjoys all aspects of the subject, ranging from the recreational to the highly abstract and technical. He has also done a lot of study in the area of recursive functions, computability, and various complexity classes.

He adores games and puzzles of all sorts:  he plays them, creates them, and sometimes even publishes them. Oriel's quest in puzzle creation is discovering complexity hidden within simplicity. Bends puzzles are easy to explain and hard to solve, and they are a great example. The lore of NP-completeness has been a good source of ideas for problems with this property (three-coloring a planar map, for instance).

Oriel is a Software Architect professionally, working for Blackwell Consulting in Chicago, and the associated programming skills are also very useful in creating and solving puzzles. The best computer folks have a knack for abstraction and generalization and for conveying the complex in simple guise. Thus, Oriel enjoys a subtle interplay between his work, his training, and his quest as a puzzle developer. However, he says, "There’s always the possibility of rethinking what I want to be when I grow up as I fast approach my thirtieth birthday!"

He has been published by Penny Press Logic Problems, by Games Magazine, and by Kadon Enterprises. As an active member of Mensa, he runs a Logic Problem Tournament twice a year at two of the gatherings and has spoken several times on Game Theory.


Shortcut back to Vee-21 Back to Vee-21

©2003 Kadon Enterprises, Inc.