Photo courtesy of David Genter Michigan Tech Alumnus David Genter has created a math puzzle that debuted last month in the Daily Mining Gazette. It appears each Tuesday, including today, on page B4

HOUGHTON — David Genter earned both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Michigan Technological University in mechanical engineering. He went on to Columbus, Indiana, where he spent 37 years at Cummins Corporation designing internal combustion engine systems and electrified drivetrains, including leading the design of Cummins’ largest engine system – the QSK95 (95-liter) engine.

Genter admits that much of his role as a design engineer for Cummins satisfied his need for solving puzzles. “To me, the role of design engineering was like putting together an extraordinarily complex puzzle, and one that had an infinite number of solutions.” He said it wasn’t just his job to design one of the the world’s largest mining haul truck engines, but to do so better than his competitors. To do this, he said, took an entire career of gaining an intimate understanding of large high-speed internal combustion engine systems, an enhanced ability to innovatively resolve challenging engineering problems, and in-depth knowledge of the diverse markets and applications served by that particular engine. “In many ways, this challenge was the ultimate puzzle. That is, starting from nothing but a clean sheet of paper, and over time, turning it into the world-class 4400 hp mining engine it is today. The whole experience was incredibly challenging, but easily the most gratifying of my entire career,” Genter said.

Genter retired from Cummins last June to spend more time with his family and to return to the Keweenaw, a location he came to know and love when at Michigan Tech. While David and his Michelle were in the process of moving, he uncovered a puzzle that he created around 2008 to encourage his two boys to enjoy math.

Genter said, “When I created the puzzle, I was traveling back and forth to Austria every month to resolve a fuel systems issue on one of our engines. This involved hours upon hours of flying and staying in hotels, and somehow, the thought of this puzzle crossed my mind. I then, rather obsessively, spent hundreds of hours trying to ensure that it was something my kids would enjoy, that was unique (or novel), that both them and I would find challenging to solve and to create, and finally, a concept with the potential of being made new every day.”

The result was a puzzle that uniquely integrated factorials, square-roots, cube roots, quantities to different powers, sine, cosine, tangent, and other operations into an equation matrix. The addition of these operations provided the ability to easily tailor the complexity of the puzzle to a “one-star” design (easiest) to a three-star puzzle (most difficult) and integrating a feature, Genter said, no other puzzle had.

Shortly after moving to Keweenaw Bay, Genter contacted the Daily Mining Gazette which began running the puzzle on Tuesdays beginning last month. DMG Community Editor Mark Wilcox said the initial response has been quite positive. “Several people have commented that it is challenging and somewhat addictive,” Wilcox said. “I was talking to several high school math teachers last week who were impressed with the puzzle. The fact that it is produced locally and at this point exclusively for the Gazette, makes it even more special.”

For those wishing to try out the new puzzle, its creator offered a tip. “The key is knowing where to place the brackets to be able to work the equations both horizontally and vertically. To my knowledge, there is only one solution to each puzzle, even for the straight-forward one-star designs. When adding factorial and other operations to the numbers and/or brackets, the puzzle becomes much more fun and challenging to all those that enjoy math.”

This week’s math puzzle, along with last week’s solution, can found on page B4.