| Rochelle Kronzek: Dick, please tell our readers a little bit about your professional background. |
| Dick Hess: I have an undergraduate degree from Cal Tech and a PhD from Berkeley. For much of my professional career I worked within the aerospace industry. I was with Logicon for twenty-seven years. I'm the author of three books, two of them recreational math puzzle books and the third, seven editions of a wire puzzle compendium. |
| Rochelle: And how about your personal accomplishments? |
| Dick Hess: My wife Jackie and I will celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary next year. We have 3 children and 4 grandchildren. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: Let's go a little further back and talk about your childhood and what fueled your interest in science and math, specifically in recreational math. |
| Dick Hess: My mom was a schoolteacher. She taught English. Her father was a math professor at UC Berkeley. My dad was an electrical engineering grad from Cal Tech who chose to become an attorney. |
| I've always had an interest in numbers. My mother told me that I was fascinated with the numbers on a calendar. I would cut them out and try to make patterns with them before I was in kindergarten. I would double the numbers: 2,4,8,16 and wonder why the calendar month ended after 30 or 31. By the time I was five or six years old, I knew that I would grow up to be a scientist someday. |
| My parents frequently challenged me, my twin brother, and my sister to sharpen our problem solving skills through a variety of puzzles and games. |
| My dad happened to like mechanical puzzles and started a modest collection of them when I was young. He shared them with me and I enjoyed using them. I had solved them all by the time I was twelve years old. I began my own mechanical puzzle collection and had accumulated nearly 400 of them by the time I was in college. My dad also read Martin Gardner's column in the Scientific American. I started reading it as well when I was 16-18 years old. I worked on Martin's puzzles with my dad. I began corresponding with Martin Gardner while in graduate school. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: I know that you've been a regular attendee of the Gathering for Gardner meetings over many years. Had you ever met Martin? |
| Dick Hess: I had been corresponding with Martin and first met him in the late 1980s when I took a side trip to Hendersonville, NC (where he was residing) while I was away on business. I'd actually gone to visit Martin three or four times since the late eighties. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: So, what became of your mechanical puzzle hobby, and I understand that you have another active passion as well? |
| Dick Hess: Along with enjoying recreational math, I've had a lifelong passion for tennis. My parents first taught me the game when I was seven or eight years old. By the time I was a senior in high school, my partner and I won the doubles championship for the Los Angeles Unified School District. At Cal Tech, I was their #1 tennis player from my sophomore through senior years. Throughout the years, I've accumulated over thirty singles and doubles trophies. But back to puzzles… |
| By the time I was in graduate school, I had collected over 450 mechanical puzzles. In 1978, I went to my first match at Wimbledon. While there, I met James Dalgety who has the world's largest collection of mechanical puzzles. He has an online Mechanical Puzzle Museum today. I went to see James' puzzle collection while I was in London, which inspired me to expand my own collection. I've shared twenty-five visits with James Dalgety since that first trip. In a few weeks, I'll be attending my thirty-first Wimbledon Championship event! |
| In 1978, the first ever International Puzzle Party was organized by Jerry Slocum. I attended the 1979 International Puzzle Party and have been going ever since. It is an annual event that rotates locations between the US, Asia and Europe. It was held in Japan last year and will be held in Washington DC in 2012. |
| I'm an avid reader of various puzzle columns and puzzle corners such as the MIT Puzzle Corner. I routinely send solutions in for the problems and have done so for years. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: Please tell our readers some of the other strong puzzle sites that you frequent. |
| Dick Hess: There's the Crux Mathematicorum, the Journal of Recreational Mathematics, Pi Mu Epsilon Journal, The Bent and the Puzzle Corner in Technology Review. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: How large is your own mechanical puzzle collection today? |
| Dick Hess: I have over 25,000 mechanical puzzles in my collection. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: I believe that you've created several dozen of your own mechanical puzzles. In fact, I read in someone's online blog recently, that it took them over a year to solve your YAK puzzle. What are entanglement puzzles, Dick? |
| Dick Hess: Entanglement puzzles are mechanical puzzles that form patterns. There are two basic kinds of entanglement puzzles, (a) rigid (wire etc.) and (b) not rigid entanglement puzzles (using straps, cords etc.). These entanglement puzzles engage puzzlists to put the pieces together or to take them apart. In the most common entanglement puzzle, a ring comes off or three pieces come apart. |
| Some of my own puzzles take 500 or 1,000 moves in order to be solved. There is one Chinese ring puzzle in my collection that has 15 rings. It takes 31,000 moves to get the ring off and back on again! |
| Rochelle Kronzek: I believe that you started your Wire Compendium some time ago. |
| Dick Hess: I started the publication over twenty-five years ago. It has gone through seven editions and has a small but loyal following. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: I'm very pleased at being the sponsoring editor for your just released Mental Gymnastics collection of recreational math puzzles. I've placed your bonus puzzles in this month's newsletter, but please give our readers three different levels of puzzles within your book that they can either tackle themselves or share with their children, grandchildren or loved ones. |
| Dick Hess: I'd encourage folks to tackle Pages 3 and 62 for easier problems, pages 16 and 28 for intermediate solvers and pages 37 and 41 for experts. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: Who are the scientists and mathematicians that are your favorites? |
| Dick Hess: My dad first introduced me to Fermat, prime numbers and number theory when I was little. |
| When I was an undergraduate at Cal Tech, Richard Feynman was teaching at the school. He used to come over to the dorms and eat dinner with physics majors and then give informal lectures to us! Feynman also offered a non-credit "Physics X" course on campus that I sat in on. He was quite an interesting and engaging man. |
| Of course, Martin Gardner will ALWAYS be a favorite figure to me. |
| Rochelle Kronzek: I want to end this informal interview with a trivia question: Who was your most famous ancestor? |
| Dick Hess: My fifth great grandfather on my mother's side was Benjamin Franklin! |
| Rochelle Kronzek: Me thinks that you've inherited a bit of his curiosity, ingenuity and wisdom! Thank you for talking with me, Dick! |
