Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914May 22, 2010) was an American writer on popular mathematics and popular science. His interests also encompassed magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton.Martin (2010)Singmaster, D. (2010) "Obituary: Martin Gardner (1914–2010)" Nature 465(7300), 884. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll;Kindley (2015): When it comes to explanations of Carroll’s books, no one has yet improved on the work of Gardner. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies.Martin Gardner obituary Telegraph Media Group (2010) He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers.Costello (1988): p. 114. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.England (2014): Even apart from mathematics and puzzles, Gardner's output was staggering."Martin Gardner dies at 95; prolific mathematics columnist for Scientific American" by Thomas H. Maugh, Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2010
Gardner was best known for creating and sustaining interest in recreational mathematics—and by extension, mathematics in general—throughout the latter half of the 20th century, principally through his "Mathematical Games" columns.AMS Notices (2011): "Martin Gardner was a gem. There is absolutely no question that he, more than anyone else in the world, was responsible for turning people of all ages on to the pleasures of mathematical recreations." —Ronald L. GrahamCase (2014): Gardner is credited with the rebirth of recreational mathematics in the U.S. These appeared for twenty-five years in Scientific American, and his subsequent books collecting them.Martin (2010): "His mathematical writings intrigued a generation of mathematicians."Bellos (2010): "He became a kind of father figure to a generation of young mathematicians, who corresponded with him. Such was Gardner's influence between the late 1950s and 1980s that it would be hard to find a professional mathematician from those years who does not cite him as an inspiration."
Gardner was one of the foremost anti-pseudoscience polemicists of the 20th century. His 1957 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Scienceoriginally published in 1952 as In the Name of Science: An Entertaining Survey of the High Priests and Cultists of Science, Past and Present is a seminal work of the skeptical movement. In 1976, he joined with fellow skeptics to found CSICOP, an organization promoting scientific inquiry and the use of reason in examining extraordinary claims.
Biography
Youth and education Martin Gardner was born into a prosperous family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to James Henry Gardner, a petroleum geologist,James Gardner later became the 8th President of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. and his wife, Willie Wilkerson Spiers, a Montessori-trained teacher. His mother taught Martin to read before he started school, reading him The Wizard of Oz, which began a lifelong interest in the Oz books of L. Frank Baum. His fascination with mathematics started in his boyhood when his father gave him a copy of Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5000 Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrums.Suzuki (1996) at 17:20MacTutor
He attended the University of Chicago where he studied history, literature and sciences under their intellectually-stimulating Great Books curriculum and earned his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1936. Early jobs included reporter on the Tulsa Tribune, writer at the University of Chicago Office of Press Relations, and case worker in Chicago's Black Belt for the city's Relief Administration. During World War II, he served for four years in the U.S. Navy as a yeoman on board the destroyer escort USS Pope in the Atlantic. His ship was still in the Atlantic when the war came to an end with the surrender of Japan in August 1945.
After the war, Gardner returned to the University of Chicago.Shermer (1997) He attended graduate school for a year there, but he did not earn an advanced degree.
Early career In the late 1940s, Gardner moved to New York City and became a writer and editor at Humpty Dumpty magazine, where for eight years, he wrote features and stories for it and several other children's magazines.Yam, Philip (December 1995) Profile: Martin Gardner, the Mathematical Gamester (1914–2010) Scientific American His paper-folding puzzles at that magazine led to his first work at Scientific American. For many decades, Gardner, his wife Charlotte, and their two sons, Jim and Tom, lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he earned his living as a freelance author, publishing books with several different publishers, and also publishing hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles.Gardner, Martin (2013)
Middle age In 1950, he wrote an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist".Gardner, Martin, "The Hermit Scientist", Antioch Review, Winter 1950–1951, pp. 447–457. It was one of Gardner's earliest articles about junk science, and in 1952 a much-expanded version became his first published book: In the Name of Science: An Entertaining Survey of the High Priests and Cultists of Science, Past and Present. The year 1960 saw the original edition of the best-selling book of his career, The Annotated Alice.Burstein (2011)
In 1957 Gardner started writing a column for Scientific American called "Mathematical Games". It ran for over a quarter century and dealt with the subject of recreational mathematics. The "Mathematical Games" column became the most popular feature of the magazine and was the first thing that many readers turned to.Hofstadter (2010): There were thousands of such people spread all around the worldmathematicians, physicists, philosophers, computer scientists, and on and onwho thought of Martin Gardner's column not as merely a feature of that great magazine Scientific American, but as its very heart and soul. In September 1977 Scientific American acknowledged the prestige and popularity of Gardner's column by moving it from the back to the very front of the magazine.Demaine (2008): p. 24
Retirement and death In 1979, Gardner left Scientific American. He and his wife Charlotte moved to Hendersonville, North Carolina. He continued to write math articles, sending them to The Mathematical Intelligencer, Math Horizons, The College Mathematics Journal, and Scientific American. He also revised some of his older books such as Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube.Richards (2014) Charlotte died in 2000 and in 2004 Gardner returned to Oklahoma,Albers (2008) where his son, James Gardner, was a professor of education at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. He died there on May 22, 2010. An autobiographyUndiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardnerwas published posthumously.
Mathematical Games column
The "Mathematical Games" column began with a free-standing article on hexaflexagons which ran in the December 1956 issue of Scientific American.Mulcahy (2014)The Economist (2010) Flexagons became a bit of a fad and soon people all over New York City were making them. Gerry Piel, the SA publisher at the time, asked Gardner, "Is there enough similar material to this to make a regular feature?". Gardner said he thought so. The January 1957 issue contained his first column, entitled "Mathematical Games". Almost 300 more columns were to follow.AMS Notices (2004)
It ran from 1956 to 1981 with sporadic columns afterwards and was the first introduction of many subjects to a wider audience, notably:Adamatzky, A. (Ed.) (2010). Game of Life Cellular Automata ebook, . pp. 15–16, Conway came to New York to meet with Gardner [and] could not believe the amount of interest Gardner's columns on the game of Life had generated.
Flexagons (Dec 1956) The Game of Hex (Jul 1957) The Soma cube (Sep 1958) Squaring the square (Nov 1958) The Three Prisoners problem (Oct 1959) Polyominoes (Nov 1960) The Paradox of the unexpected hanging (Mar 1963) Rep-tiles (May 1963) The Superellipse (Sep 1965) Pentominoes (Oct 1965) The mathematical art of M. C. Escher (Apr 1966) Fractals and the Koch snowflake curve (Mar 1967) Conway's Game of Life (Oct 1970) Intransitive dice (Dec 1970) Newcomb's paradox (Jul 1973) Tangrams (Aug 1974) Penrose tilings (Jan 1977) Public-key cryptography (Aug 1977) Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach (Jul 1979) The Monster group (Jun 1980)
Gardner had problems learning calculus and never took a mathematics course after high school. While editing Humpty Dumpty Magazine he constructed many paper folding puzzles. At a magic show in 1956 fellow magician Royal Vale Heath introduced Gardner to the intricately folded paper shapes known as flexagons and steered him to the four Princeton University professors who had invented and investigated their mathematical properties. The subsequent article Gardner wrote on hexaflexagons led directly to the column.
Gardner's son Jim once asked him what was his favorite puzzle, and Gardner answered almost immediately: "The monkey and the coconuts".Antonick, Gary (2013). Martin Gardner’s The Monkey and the Coconuts in Numberplay The New York Times:, October 7, 2013 It had been the subject of his April 1958 Games column and in 2001 he chose to make it the first chapter of his "best of" collection, The Colossal Book of Mathematics.Gardner, Martin The Colossal Book of Mathematics: Classic Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Problems (2001), W.W. Norton & Company;
In the 1980s "Mathematical Games" began to appear only irregularly. Other authors began to share the column, and the June 1986 issue saw the final installment under that title. In 1981, on Gardner's retirement from Scientific American, the column was replaced by Douglas Hofstadter's "Metamagical Themas", a name that is an anagram of "Mathematical Games".
Virtually all of the games columns were collected in book formPeter Renz Memories of Martin Gardner Notices of the AMS, vol 58 #3, p. 421 starting in 1959 with The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions.Martin Gardner: Mathematical Games Collections by David Langford Over the next four decades fourteen more books followed.England (2014) Donald Knuth called them the canonical books.The New Martin Gardner Mathematical Library Cambridge University PressThe Canon: The fifteen "Mathematical Games" books at martin-gardner.org
Influence