37 Puzzle designers

Miguel Ortiz Berrocal was an award-winning Spanish figurative and abstract sculptor. He is best known for his puzzle sculptures, which can be disassembled into many abstract pieces. These works are also known for the miniature artworks and jewelry incorporated into or concealed within them, and the fact that some of the sculptures can be reassembled or reconfigured into different arrangements. Berrocal's sculptures span a wide range of physical sizes from monumental outdoor public works, to intricate puzzle sculptures small enough to be worn as pendants, bracelets, or other body ornamentation.

Commodore Laurence Phillip Brokenshire CBE (1952–2017), known as Laurie Brokenshire, was a Royal Naval officer, magician and world-class puzzle solver.

Dan Chamizer is an Israeli artist, radio and television host, journalist and quiz master.

Emily Cox is an American puzzle writer. She and her partner, Henry Rathvon, wrote "The Atlantic Puzzler," a cryptic crossword featured each month in the magazine The Atlantic Monthly from 1977 to August 2009. They also create acrostic puzzles for The New York Times, cryptic crosswords for Canada's National Post, various puzzles for the US Airways in-flight magazine, and Sunday crosswords for The Boston Globe. Cox and Rathvon are now also contributing cryptic crosswords to The Wall Street Journal on Saturdays.

Oskar van Deventer is a Dutch puzzle maker. He prototypes puzzles using 3D printing. His work combines mathematics, physics, and design, and he collaborates at academic institutions. Many of his combination puzzles are in mass production by Uwe Mèffert and WitEden. Oskar van Deventer has also designed puzzles for Hanayama.

Henry Ernest Dudeney was an English author and mathematician who specialised in logic puzzles and mathematical games. He is known as one of the country's foremost creators of mathematical puzzles.

Elonka Dunin is an American video game developer and cryptologist. Dunin worked at Simutronics Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri from 1990–2014, and in 2015 was Senior Producer at Black Gate Games in Nashville, Tennessee. She is Chairperson Emerita and one of the founders of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games group, has contributed or been editor in chief on multiple IGDA State of the Industry white papers, and was one of the Directors of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. As of 2020 she works as a management consultant at Accenture.

Tony Fisher is a British puzzle designer who specialises in creating custom rotational puzzles. He is acknowledged by cubing enthusiasts as a pioneer in the creation of new puzzle designs and new manufacturing techniques. In 2017 the Guinness Book of World Records acknowledged Fisher as the creator of the world's largest Rubik's cube.

Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer, with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature—especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and was regarded as one of the most important magicians of the twentieth century. He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.

George William Hart is an American geometer. He is an interdepartmental research professor at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, New York and his work includes both academic and artistic approaches to mathematics.

Piet Hein was a Danish polymath, often writing under the Old Norse pseudonym Kumbel, meaning "tombstone". His short poems, known as gruks or grooks, first started to appear in the daily newspaper Politiken shortly after the German occupation of Denmark in April 1940 under the pseudonym "Kumbel Kumbell". He also invented the Soma cube and the board game Hex.

David Kalvitis is an artist, graphic designer, puzzle inventor, and owner of Monkeying Around, publisher of his collections of dot-to-dot-puzzles. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, Kalvitis is the eldest of three children. He currently resides in Rochester, New York.

David Kwong is a magician, puzzle creator, writer, and producer.

Samuel Loyd, was an American chess player, chess composer, puzzle author, and recreational mathematician. Loyd was born in Philadelphia but raised in New York City.

Christopher M. Maslanka is a British writer and broadcaster, specialising in puzzles and problem solving.

Uwe Mèffert is a German puzzle designer and inventor. He has manufactured and sold mechanical puzzles in the style of Rubik's Cube since the original Cube craze. His first design was the Pyraminx(Created before the original Rubik's cube.) and others include the Megaminx, Skewb and Skewb Diamond. More recently he has licensed and re-released designs from other manufacturers, such as Dogic.

Steven Eric Meretzky is an American video game developer. He is best known for creating Infocom games in the early 1980s, including collaborating with author Douglas Adams on the interactive fiction version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of the first games to be certified "platinum" by the Software Publishers Association. Later, he created the Spellcasting trilogy, the flagship adventure series of Legend Entertainment. He has been involved in almost every aspect of game development, from design to production to quality assurance and box design.

Stanley Newman is an American puzzle creator, editor, and publisher. Newman has been the editor of the Newsday Sunday crossword puzzle since 1988 and the editor of the Newsday daily crossword puzzle since 1992. He is also a trivia buff and the co-author of a trivia encyclopedia, 15,003 Answers.

Larry D. Nichols, born 1939 in the United States, is a puzzle designer. He grew up in Xenia, Ohio, and studied chemistry at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, before moving to Massachusetts to attend Harvard Graduate School. He is best known for the invention of mechanical puzzles including 'The Nichols Cube Puzzle' (1974), patent US365520. He has lived with his wife Karen in Arlington, Massachusetts since 1959.

Edward Taylor Pegg Jr. is an expert on mathematical puzzles and is a self-described recreational mathematician. He wrote an online puzzle column called Ed Pegg Jr.'s Math Games for the Mathematical Association of America during the years 2003–2007. His puzzles have also been used by Will Shortz on the puzzle segment of NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday.

Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was murdered in the Holocaust, and many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.

Yakov Isidorovich Perelman was a Russian and Soviet science writer and author of many popular science books, including Physics Can Be Fun and Mathematics Can Be Fun.

Hubert Phillips was a British economist, journalist, broadcaster, bridge player and organiser, composer of puzzles and quizzes, and the author of some 70 books.

Henry Rathvon is a puzzle writer. He and his partner, Emily Cox, wrote The Atlantic Puzzler, a cryptic crossword featured each month in the magazine The Atlantic Monthly from September 1977 to October 2009. They also create acrostic puzzles for the New York Times, cryptic crosswords for Canada's National Post, puzzles for the US Airways in-flight magazine, and Sunday crosswords for the Boston Globe.

Ernő Rubik is a Hungarian inventor, architect and professor of architecture. He is best known for the invention of mechanical puzzles including the Rubik's Cube (1974), Rubik's Magic, Rubik's Magic: Master Edition, and Rubik's Snake.

Mike Selinker is a game designer, puzzle maker, and president of Lone Shark Games, a company which he founded.

William F. Shortz is an American puzzle creator and editor and crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times.

Jerry Slocum is an American historian, collector and author specializing on the field of mechanical puzzles. He worked as an engineer at Hughes Aircraft prior to retiring and dedicating his life to puzzles.

Raymond Merrill Smullyan was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher.

Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist known for his work in musical theatre.

John Spilsbury was a British cartographer and engraver. He is credited as the inventor of the jigsaw puzzle. Spilsbury created them for educational purposes, and called them “Dissected Maps”.

Jelmer Jan Steenhuis is a Dutch creator of puzzles and games. Steenhuis is best known for his weekly puzzles in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad and magazine Vrij Nederland.

David Steinberg is a crossword constructor and editor. At 14, he became the then second-youngest person to publish a crossword in The New York Times during Will Shortz's editorship. At 15, he became the youngest published constructor in the Los Angeles Times and the youngest known crossword editor ever for a major newspaper.

Joan C. Steiner was an American illustrator and puzzle designer. A graduate of Barnard College, she was the recipient of numerous art and design awards, including a Society of Illustrators Award and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Ivan Trnski was a Croatian writer, translator and puzzle designer. Glorified by his contemporaries as a great poet and patriot, he is now considered a skillful poet and a prolific author of occasional verse.

Christopher "Kit" Williams is an English artist, illustrator and author best known for his 1979 book Masquerade, a pictorial storybook which contains clues to the location of a golden jewelled hare created by Williams and then buried "somewhere in Britain".

Nobuyuki Yoshigahara was perhaps Japan's most celebrated inventor, collector, solver, and communicator of puzzles.