Martin Gardner

Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing magic, scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literatureespecially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was a leading authority on Lewis Carroll; The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. 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. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
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. These appeared for twenty-five years in Scientific American, and his subsequent books collecting them.
Gardner was one of the foremost anti-pseudoscience polemicists of the 20th century. His 1957 book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science 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, 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, and this 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.
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. 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. 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.

Middle age

In 1950, he wrote an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist". 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.
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. 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.

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. Charlotte died in 2000 and in 2004 Gardner returned to Oklahoma, 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. 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.
It ran from 1956 to 1981 with sporadic columns afterwards and was the first introduction of many subjects to a wider audience, notably:

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". 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.
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 form starting in 1959 with The Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles & Diversions. Over the next four decades fourteen more books followed. Donald Knuth called them the canonical books.

Influence

Martin Gardner had a major impact on mathematics in the second half of the 20th century. His column ran for 25 years and was read avidly by the generation of mathematicians and physicists who grew up in the years 1956 to 1981. His writing inspired, directly or indirectly, many who would go on to careers in mathematics, science, and other related endeavors.
Gardner's admirers included such diverse individuals as W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould, and the entire French literary group known as the Oulipo. Salvador Dalí once sought him out to discuss four-dimensional hypercubes. David Auerbach wrote: "A case can be made, in purely practical terms, for Martin Gardner as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. His popularizations of science and mathematical games in Scientific American, over the 25 years he wrote for them, might have helped create more young mathematicians and computer scientists than any other single factor prior to the advent of the personal computer." Colm Mulcahy described him as "without doubt the best friend mathematics ever had."
Gardner's column introduced the public to books such as A K Dewdney’s Planiverse and Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach. His writing was credited as both broad and deep. Noam Chomsky once wrote, "Martin Gardner's contribution to contemporary intellectual culture is uniquein its range, its insight, and understanding of hard questions that matter." Gardner repeatedly alerted the public to recent discoveries in mathematics–recreational and otherwise. In addition to introducing many first-rate puzzles and topics such as Penrose tiles and Conway's Game of Life, he was equally adept at writing columns about traditional mathematical topics such as knot theory, Fibonacci numbers, Pascal's triangle, the Möbius strip, transfinite numbers, four-dimensional space, Zeno's paradoxes, Fermat's Last Theorem, and the four-color problem.
Gardner set a new high standard for writing about mathematics. In a 2004 interview he said, "I go up to calculus, and beyond that I don't understand any of the papers that are being written. I consider that that was an advantage for the type of column I was doing because I had to understand what I was writing about, and that enabled me to write in such a way that an average reader could understand what I was saying. If you are writing popularly about math, I think it's good not to know too much math." John Horton Conway called him "the most learned man I have ever met."