Forget Tom Hanks. Meet the Real Professor Langdon. (Chr. of Higher Ed)

By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

Tilt your head, squint, look upside down.

No matter how you look at it, it's impossible to see how a typography professor at Drexel University ended up on the red carpet at a movie premiere in the heart of Rome last month. It would take a secret society to pull off something like that.

There was John Langdon, though, with Tom Hanks, the star of Angels & Demons, who plays Professor Robert Langdon, the symbologist at the center of Dan Brown's two best-selling mystery-thrillers. (The Da Vinci Code was written later but turned into a movie first.) Of course, in both of these stories, the star is a Harvard professor. Just think of the lost branding opportunities for Drexel.

The tale of how the real Professor Langdon ended up next to the fake Professor Langdon began more than 15 years ago. That's when a mathematics teacher named Dick Brown picked up Mr. Langdon's book Wordplay, a compendium of typographical designs called ambigrams.

Mr. Langdon, who began making them in the 1970s, is generally known as one of the fathers of ambigrams, which can look like the same or different words when read from multiple viewpoints or orientations.

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