About Wei-hwa Huang
Wei-hwa Huang is an alumnus of the 1993 STS. After graduating from Caltech, he worked as a software engineer at Google before making puzzling his career. Today, Huang is an award-winning game designer and professional puzzler who has won the World Puzzle Championship four times. Huang has also published a crossword puzzle in The New York Times and created a series of number logic puzzles for the newspaper. Huang’s joy for creating games and puzzles has led to work with game companies like ThinkFun and a 2019 team win at the annual, world-renowned MIT Mystery Hunt.
Huang (kneeling in the first row on the right) gave the first crossword he ever made to President Clinton when he and his fellow STS finalists met with the president. Several weeks later, Huang received the completed puzzle in the mail, signed by the president.
Science Talent Search 1993
Huang’s first crossword, which he included in his STS application. He wrote, “I was curious to see if I could write a successful crossword puzzle, and I think I did.”
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In the News
Huang reflected on his STS experience and discussed his career in this Conversations with Maya interview in 2020.
He was also profiled in the Society’s blog in 2019: This STS alum is a New York Times puzzle creator.
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