Martin Gardner (October 21, 1914 - May 22, 2010) was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer, with interests also encompassing micromagic, scientific skepticism, philosophy, religion, and literature—especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was considered 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 was a prolific author and altogether published more than 100 books.

Gardner was one of the foremost anti-pseudoscience polemicists of the 20th century. His book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science published in 1957 became a classic and seminal work of the skeptical movement. In 1976 he joined with fellow skeptics to found CSICOP, an organization devoted to debunking pseudoscience, and for many years wrote a monthly column for that organization's monthly magazine.

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 which appeared for twenty-five years in Scientific American and his subsequent books collecting them.

Biography

Youth and education

Gardner, son of a petroleum geologist, grew up in and around Tulsa, Oklahoma. He showed an early interest in puzzles and games, and his closest childhood friend, John Bennett Shaw, later became "the greatest of all collectors of Sherlockian memorabilia". He attended the University of Chicago, where he 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. In 1950 he published an article in the Antioch Review entitled "The Hermit Scientist", a pioneering work on what would later come to be called the pseudoscientist. It was Gardner's first publication of a skeptical nature, and two years later it was published in a much-expanded book version: In the Name of Science, his first book.

Early career

In the late 1940s, Gardner moved to New York City and became a writer and designer 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 (sister publication to Children's Digest at the time, and now sister publication to Jack and Jill magazine) led to his first work at Scientific American. For many decades, Gardner, his wife Charlotte, and their two sons lived in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he earned his living as an independent author, publishing books with several different publishers, and also publishing hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles. Appropriately enough—given his interest in logic and mathematics—they lived on Euclid Avenue. The year 1960 saw the original edition of his best-selling book ever, The Annotated Alice, various editions of which have sold over a million copies worldwide in several languages.

Gatherings for Gardner

Gardner was famously shy and declined many honors when he learned that a public appearance would be required if he accepted. (He once told Colm Mulcahy that he "never gave a lecture in his life and that he wouldn't know how to.") However, in 1993 Atlanta puzzle collector Tom Rodgers persuaded Gardner to attend an evening devoted to Gardner's puzzle-solving efforts, called "Gathering for Gardner". The event was repeated in 1996, again with Gardner in attendance, which convinced Rodgers and his friends to make the gathering a regular event. It has been held since then in even-numbered years near Atlanta, and the program consists of any topic which could have been touched by Gardner during his writing career. The event's name is abbreviated to "G4Gn", with n being replaced by the number of the event (the 2010 event thus was G4G9). Gardner attended the 1993 and 1996 events.

Retirement and death

In 1979, Gardner and his wife Charlotte semi-retired and moved to Hendersonville, North Carolina. Gardner never really retired as an author, but rather he continued to do literature research and to write, especially in updating many of his older books, such as Origami, Eleusis, and the Soma Cube, ISBN 978-0-521-73524-7, published 2008. Charlotte died in 2000 and two years later Gardner returned to Norman, Oklahoma, where his son, James Gardner, was a professor of education at the University of Oklahoma. He died there on May 22, 2010. An autobiography — Undiluted Hocus-Pocus: The Autobiography of Martin Gardner — was published posthumously.

Influence

His depth and clarity will illuminate our world for a long time.

-Persi Diaconis

Martin Gardner had a major impact on mathematics in the second half of the 20th century. His column was called "Mathematical Games" but it was much more than that. His writing introduced many readers to real mathematics for the first time in their lives. The column lasted for 25 years and was read avidly by the generation of mathematicians and physicists who grew up in the years 1956 to 1981. It was the original inspiration for many of them to become mathematicians or scientists themselves.

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." Among the wide array of mathematicians, physicists, computer scientists, philosophers, magicians, artists, writers, and other influential thinkers who inspired and were in turn inspired by Gardner are John Horton Conway, Bill Gosper, Ron Rivest, Richard K. Guy, Piet Hein, Ronald Graham, Donald Knuth, Robert Nozick, Lee Sallows, Scott Kim, M. C. Escher, Douglas Hofstadter, Roger Penrose, Ian Stewart, Benoit Mandelbrot, Elwyn R. Berlekamp, Solomon W. Golomb, Raymond Smullyan, James Randi, Persi Diaconis, Penn & Teller, and Ray Hyman.

His admirers included such diverse people as W. H. Auden, Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Richard Dawkins, and Stephen Jay Gould. Salvador Dali once sought him out to discuss four-dimensional hypercubes. M. C. Escher wrote to Gardner in 1961 after reading The Annotated Alice and this led to Gardner introducing the previously unknown Escher's art to the world. His writing was both broad and deep. Noam Chomsky once wrote, "Martin Gardner's contribution to contemporary intellectual culture is unique-in its range, its insight, and understanding of hard questions that matter." Gardner repeatedly alerted the public (and other mathematicians) to recent discoveries in mathematics-recreational and otherwise. These included Conway's Game of Life, Penrose's aperiodic tiles, Golomb's Pentominos, Piet Hein's superellipse, Soma cube, and Game of Hex, nontransitive dice, squaring the square, the pathological Koch snowflake curve, Newcomb's paradox, RSA cryptography and the hexaflexagons discovered by Arthur H. Stone. He was equally adept at writing captivating columns about many 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.

Martin 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." And he was fearsomely bright. John Horton Conway called him, "the most learned man I have ever met." Colm Mulcahy said, "Gardner was without doubt the best friend mathematics ever had." Many people would agree with him.

Mathematical Games column

For more details on this topic, see List of Martin Gardner Mathematical Games columns.

I just play all the time and am fortunate enough to get paid for it.

- Martin Gardner, 1998

For over a quarter century Gardner wrote a monthly column on the subject of recreational mathematics for Scientific American. It all began with his free-standing article on hexaflexagons which ran in the December 1956 issue. 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.

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. It ran from 1956 to 1981 and was the first introduction of many subjects to a wider audience, notably:

• Flexagons (Dec 1956)
• The Game of Hex (Jul 1957)
• The Soma cube (Sep 1958)
• The Three Prisoners problem (Oct 1959)
• Polyominoes (Nov 1960)
• The Paradox of the unexpected hanging (Mar 1963)
• Rep-tiles (May 1963)
• The game of Hare and Hounds (Oct 1963)
• The Superellipse (Sep 1965)
• Pentominoes (Oct 1965)
• The mathematical art of M. C. Escher (Apr 1966)
• Fractals (Mar 1967)
• Conway's Game of Life (Oct 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)

Ironically, Gardner had problems learning calculus and never took a mathematics course after high school. While editing Humpty Dumpty's Magazine he constructed many paper folding puzzles, and this led to his interest in the flexagons invented by British mathematician Arthur H Stone. The subsequent article he wrote on hexaflexagons led directly to the column.

In the 1980s the "Mathematical Games" column 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".

Many 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.

Pseudoscience and skepticism

Martin Gardner is the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surround us.

- Stephen Jay Gould

Gardner was an uncompromising critic of fringe science. His book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1952, revised 1957) explored and debunked myriad dubious movements and theories, including Fletcherism, food faddism, Dowsing Rods, Charles Fort, Rudolf Steiner, Dianetics, the Bates method for improving eyesight, Einstein deniers, the Flat Earth theory, the lost continents of Atlantis and Lemuria, Immanuel Velikovsky’s worlds in collision, the reincarnation of Bridey Murphy, Wilhelm Reich's orgone theory, the spontaneous generation of life, extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis, homeopathy, phrenology, palmistry, graphology, and astrology. This book and his subsequent efforts (Science: Good, Bad and Bogus, 1981; Order and Surprise, 1983, Gardner's Whys & Wherefores, 1989, etc.) earned him a wealth of detractors and antagonists in the fields of "fringe science" and New Age philosophy, with many of whom he kept up running dialogues (both public and private) for decades.

In 1976 Gardner joined with fellow skeptics philosopher Paul Kurtz, astronomer Carl Sagan, author and biochemist Isaac Asimov, psychologist B. F. Skinner, journalist Philip J. Klass, psychologist Ray Hyman and stage magician James Randi to found the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). From 1983 to 2002 he wrote a monthly column called "Notes of a Fringe Watcher" (originally "Notes of a Psi-Watcher") for Skeptical Inquirer, that organization's monthly magazine. These columns have been collected in five books starting with The New Age: Notes of a Fringe Watcher in 1988.

Gardner was a relentless critic of self-proclaimed Israeli psychic Uri Geller and wrote two satirical booklets about him in the 1970s using the pen name "Uriah Fuller" in which he explained how such purported psychics do their seemingly impossible feats such as mentally bending spoons and reading minds.

Martin Gardner continued to criticize junk science throughout his life-and he was fearless. His targets included not just safe subjects like astrology and UFO sightings, but topics such as chiropractic, vegetarianism, Madame Blavatsky, creationism, Scientology, the Laffer curve, Christian Science, and even the Hutchins-Adler Great Books Movement. The last thing he wrote in the spring of 2010 (a month before his death) was an article excoriating the 'dubious medical opinions and bogus science' of Oprah Winfrey-particularly her support for the thoroughly discredited theory that vaccinations cause autism and went on to bemoan the 'needless deaths of children' that such notions are likely to cause.

Skeptical Inquirer named him one of the Ten Outstanding Skeptics of the Twentieth Century. In 2010 he was posthumously honored with an award recognizing his contributions in the skeptical field from the Independent Investigations Group.

Magic

Card magic, and magic in general, owe a far greater debt to Martin Gardner than most conjurors realize.

-Stephen Minch

Martin Garder's father once showed him a magic trick when he was a little boy. Young Martin was fascinated to see physical laws seemingly violated and this led to a lifelong passion for magic and illusion. He wrote for a magic magazine in high school and worked in a department store demonstrating magic tricks while he was at the University of Chicago. The very first thing that Martin Gardner ever published (at the age of fifteen) was a magic trick in The Sphinx, the official magazine of the Society of American Magicians. He focused mainly on micromagic (table or close-up magic) and, from the 1930s on, published a significant number of original contributions to this secretive field. A typical Gardner book on close-up magic is, Match Magic: More Than Seventy Impromptu Tricks With Matches, which came out in 1998. Magician Joe M. Turner said The Encyclopedia of Impromptu Magic, which Gardner wrote in 1985, "is guaranteed to show up in any poll of magicians' favorite magic books." He was well known for his innovative tapping and spelling effects, with and without playing cards, and was most proud of the effect he called the "Wink Change".

Many of Gardner's lifelong friends were magicians. These included William Simon who introduced Gardner to Charlotte Greenwald, whom he married in 1952, fellow CSICOP founder and pseudoscience-fighter James Randi, statistician Persi Diaconis, and polymath Raymond Smullyan. Diaconis and Smullyan like Gardner straddled the two worlds of mathematics and magic. Mathematics and magic were frequently intertwined in Gardner's work. One of his earliest books, Mathematics, Magic and Mystery (1956), was about mathematically based magic tricks. Mathematical magic tricks were often featured in his "Mathematical Games" column-for example, his August 1962 column was titled, "A variety of diverting tricks collected at a fictitious convention of magicians." From 1998 to 2002 he wrote a monthly column on magic tricks called "Trick of the Month" in The Physics Teacher, a journal published by the American Association of Physics Teachers.

In 1999 Magic magazine named Gardner one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". In 2005 he got a "Lifetime Achievement Award" from the Academy of Magical Arts. The last publication in his lifetime was a magic trick that he contributed to the May 2010 issue of Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics.

Theism and religion

Gardner believed in a personal God, an afterlife, and prayer, but rejected established religion. He considered himself a philosophical theist and fideist. He had an abiding fascination with religious belief but critical of organized religion. In his autobiography, he stated: "When many of my fans discovered that I believed in God and even hoped for an afterlife, they were shocked and dismayed... I do not mean the God of the Bible, especially the God of the Old Testament, or any other book that claims to be divinely inspired. For me God is a "Wholly Other" transcendent intelligence, impossible for us to understand. He or she is somehow responsible for our universe and capable of providing, how I have no inkling, an afterlife."

I am a philosophical theist. I believe in a personal God, and I believe in an afterlife, and I believe in prayer, but I don’t believe in any established religion. This is called philosophical theism.... Philosophical theism is entirely emotional. As Kant said, he destroyed pure reason to make room for faith.

- Martin Gardner, 2008

He described his own belief as philosophical theism inspired by the theology of the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. While eschewing systematic religious doctrine, Gardner believed in God, asserting that this belief cannot be confirmed or disconfirmed by reason or science. At the same time, he was skeptical of claims that any god has communicated with human beings through spoken or telepathic revelation or through miracles in the natural world.

He has been quoted as saying that he regarded parapsychology and other research into the paranormal as tantamount to "tempting God" and seeking "signs and wonders". He stated that while he would expect tests on the efficacy of prayers to be negative, he would not rule out a priori the possibility that as yet unknown paranormal forces may allow prayers to influence the physical world.

Gardner wrote repeatedly about what public figures such as Robert Maynard Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, and William F. Buckley, Jr. believed and whether their beliefs were logically consistent. In some cases, he attacked prominent religious figures such as Mary Baker Eddy on the grounds that their claims are unsupportable. His semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm depicts a traditionally Protestant Christian man struggling with his faith, examining 20th century scholarship and intellectual movements and ultimately rejecting Christianity while remaining a theist.

Gardner said that he suspected that the fundamental nature of human consciousness may not be knowable or discoverable, unless perhaps a physics more profound than ("underlying") quantum mechanics is some day developed. In this regard, he said, he was an adherent of the "New Mysterianism".

Literary criticism and fiction

Gardner was considered a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. His annotated version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, explaining the many mathematical riddles, wordplay, and literary references found in the Alice books, was first published as The Annotated Alice (Clarkson Potter, 1960), a sequel published with new annotations as More Annotated Alice (Random House, 1990), and finally as The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition (Norton, 1999) combining notes from the earlier editions and new material. The book arose when Gardner, who found the Alice books 'sort of frightening' when he was young but found them fascinating as an adult. He felt that someone ought to annotate them and suggested to a publisher that Bertrand Russell be asked; when the publisher was unable to get past Russell's secretary, Gardner was asked to take the project.

Gardner's interest in wordplay led him to conceive of a magazine on recreational linguistics. In 1967 he pitched the idea to Greenwood Periodicals and nominated Dmitri Borgmann as editor. The resulting journal, Word Ways, carried many articles from Gardner; as of 2013 it was still publishing his submissions posthumously. He also wrote a "Puzzle Tale" column for Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 1977 to 1986.

In addition to the 'Alice' books, Gardner produced "Annotated" editions of G. K. Chesterton’s The Innocence Of Father Brown and The Man Who Was Thursday as well as of celebrated poems including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Casey at the Bat, The Night Before Christmas, and The Hunting of the Snark; the last also written by Lewis Carroll.

Gardner occasionally tried his hand at fiction of a kind always closely associated with his non-fictional preoccupations. His roman à clef novel was The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973) and his short stories were collected in The No-Sided Professor and Other Tales of Fantasy, Humor, Mystery, and Philosophy (1987). Gardner published stories about an imaginary numerologist named Dr. Matrix and Visitors from Oz (1998), based on L. Frank Baum's Oz books, which reflected his love of Oz. (He was a founding member of the International Wizard of Oz Club, and winner of its 1971 L. Frank Baum Memorial Award.) Gardner was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club, the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers, the Black Widowers.

Philosophy of mathematics

Gardner was known for his sometimes controversial philosophy of mathematics. He wrote negative reviews of The Mathematical Experience by Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh and What Is Mathematics, Really? by Hersh, both of which were critical of aspects of mathematical Platonism, and the first of which was well received by the mathematical community. While Gardner was often perceived as a hard-core Platonist, his reviews demonstrated some formalist tendencies. Gardner maintained that his views are widespread among mathematicians, but Hersh has countered that in his experience as a professional mathematician and speaker, this is not the case.

Other views

Over the years Gardner held forth on many contemporary issues, arguing for his points of view in a wide range of fields, from general semantics to fuzzy logic to watching TV (he once wrote a negative review of Jerry Mander's book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television). His philosophical views are described and defended in his book The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (1983, revised 1999). Under the pseudonym "George Groth", Gardner panned his own book for the New York Review of Books.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]