A nationally recognized puzzle master and mathematics professor at Washington State University Vancouver died Wednesday after being taken off of life support at the request of his family.
The Oregonian reports that Thomas Gazzola, 55, was jogging near his Northeast Portland home last week when he was hit by a car. His 19-year-old daughter, Liz, said he had been in critical condition since the crash.
Portland Police arrested 63-year-old Richard Earl Dryden of Longview in connection with the crash. Dryden failed a field sobriety test and has been charged with driving under the influence and assault pending the outcome of blood alcohol tests.
His next court appearance is June 18.
Gazzola had taught elementary, middle and high school, and was preparing to retire from teaching in Woodburn, Ore., when he was offered a job teaching math at WSU Vancouver in 2014.
The Columbian interviewed Gazzola in February after he and 39 teammates won the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Mystery Hunt, one of the world’s oldest and most complex puzzle hunts. Over a three-day weekend, 1,600 puzzlers converged on campus, working around the clock to search for cryptic clues leading to a coin hidden on campus.
“My family loves games,” Gazzola had said after the contest. “I’m the game master of the family.”
Gazzola’s team, “Luck, I Am Your Father,” was the first to solve the 180 puzzles, including anagrams, crosswords, cryptograms, scavenger hunts and multimedia puzzles. The team’s name is word play based on a line from the film “Star Wars, Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.”
Early in the morning of the third puzzle-solving day, the teams began cracking the final, frenzied round of puzzles called the Run-Around. Gazzola’s team faced solving an enormous 30-by-5-foot word search puzzle. Racing to the very end, Gazzola’s team finished the final puzzle only 15 seconds ahead of the second-place team. In all, the hunt took almost 41 hours.
Although it was only the second time Gazzola had competed in the MIT Mystery Hunt, he was a 10-year member of the National Puzzlers League, resurrected in the 1980s by Will Shortz, the crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times. Gazzola attended the annual National Puzzlers League convention, which is in a different city each year.
“You can create puzzles out of just about anything,” Gazzola said. “I turn most things into puzzles or games. My goal in life is to have fun.”
“He loved teaching,” said Brenda Alling, spokeswoman for WSU Vancouver.
“One of the treats of math is that people don’t expect it to be fun,” he said. “Teaching is a monstrously challenging puzzle. I have 31 people in my calculus class. There are 31 ways of thinking in there. How can I reach them? Striking that balance, reading the crowd is a puzzle.”
