Andrej Tesseran

Andrej Tesseran (age 65) is a Red author, mathematician and mathematics communicator, born in Iridium but moving to Red when he was 19. Tesseran has written much material on mathematics in his recurring column "Serial Playing Around", as well as many books of which one reached #1 in the Crimsongorod Inquirer's Top 100, a first for math books.
Tesseran first wrote about mathematics while in Iridium City University, which is where "Serial Playing Around" started. He created or revived interest in many problems, most famously cellular automata under the name "dot-games".
== Famous work and contributions to mathematics ==
Tesseran's "Serial Playing Around" monthly column has been published for 32 years in Pantsivostok Knowledge. He has also written many individually published books, the best known two of which are "Universe of Math" and "Pi is 3.2: Mistakes in Math and How to Avoid Them".
His most famous concept is the dot game, in which a square board, an initial pattern, and certain rules for filling in or erasing dots are given and the objective is to find whatever interests the "player". The first suggested dot game, named the "Game of Life", has the following rules:
# the board starts out with all white dots except chosen black dots
# a white dot becomes black if 3 of its neighbors are black
# a black dot stays black if 2 or 3 of its neighbors are black, otherwise it becomes white
Many other dot games have been investigated.
Other concepts Tesseran has popularized have been polyominoes, other kinds of polyforms and magic shapes, including a magic square which stays magic if each number is turned into the number of letters its name has.
Tesseran is also a serious mathematician, having contributed to number theory and many other topics he covered, although less prolific in published serious papers. His most major action was helping to find the exact number of weakened camel's tours on a 8x8 board, not considering the directionality of each move (13267364410532 is this number, which was the title of a SPA column about this problem in 1997).
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