The Puzzle Master

It was a kiss that, in the Escher staircase of his dream, happened in the present, the past, and the future at once, a kiss that unlocked a thousand possibilities.

But the simple truth was that he didn’t know how it happened. He couldn’t explain it. His brain did it without his permission, the way his heart pumped blood or his lungs infused cells with oxygen. It latched on to patterns and sequences without his consent or, at times, his awareness and filled his head with a deluge of numbers and images. When he

his professor and mentor, Dr. Vivek Gupta, would assign him a mind-bendingly impossible problem. He would stay up all night looking at it from every angle, reversing it, folding it, twisting and turning it in every possible permutation, until something shifted in his thinking—like a window opening and allowing light to fall on a darkened room—and h