Scott Kim

Why you should listen

Over his 20-year career as a designer of visual puzzles, Scott Kim has created hundreds of puzzles for magazines, and thousands for computer games. His puzzles have appeared inside video games such as Obsidian, in browser games like Bejeweled, and in his regular monthly column, The Boggler, in Discover Magazine.

Kim's interest in puzzles sprang from an early interest in mathematics, education and art. He specializes in ambigrams, or inversions: for example, a word that reads more than one way. His first puzzles appeared in Scientific American in Martin Gardner's Mathematical Games column, and are now included in many different books, toys and games. His games can also be played on his website or found on greeting cards. Kim's 1981 book, Inversions, features a collection of "inversions" -- a word or name written so it reads in more than one way. His second book contains a collection of his puzzles originally submitted to magazines and is entitled The New Media Puzzle Workout.

What others say

“Scott Kim is the Escher of the alphabet.” — Isaac Asimov