It would be an accurate description of my life to say that, growing up, I wanted to be Martin Gardner – the famous puzzler, mathematician, essayist, magician, and writer extraordinaire.

David Suzuki once did a “Nature of Things” documentary on Martin Gardner entitled “Mathe-magic.” The 1 hour special was fascinating beyond imagination, with discussions about the mathematics of juggling, the “game of life,” hexa-flexagons, and myriad other mathematical simulacra. To introduce the documentary, a mathematician began drawing the the first name “Martin” in a fancy script. When he finished, he turned the paper over 180 degrees, and it read “Gardner.” In-frieking-credible. The text was an “ambigram,” a word or phrase that can be read in more than one way or from more than a single vantage point.

The other day, I stumbled upon Erich Friedman’s page of wonderful ambigrams, which can be found by clicking here.

Remembering that Martin Gardner documentary, I suddenly became inspired to try my hand at an ambigram of my own name. (The crudely drawn images are a result of doing this with a mouse on a computer… harder than I thought it would be).

So, here’s my first name, “Hamid”:

Now, this is the exact same image, only upside-down (rotated 180 degrees). It reads my last name, “Roman”:

I have a feeling I’m going to develop an addiction to ambigrams and attempt to draw everyone’s name I know in some similar fashion.