The man called mathematics' best friend never took a maths class after school
Martin Gardner struggled with calculus and stopped studying mathematics after high school. Yet for twenty-five years his Scientific American column turned puzzles into a gateway for a generation of mathematicians and computer scientists. He thought his limits helped: having to understand everything himself, he wrote so that any curious reader could follow.
Born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 21 October 1914, Gardner caught two lifelong passions early. His mother taught him to read with The Wizard of Oz, and his father, a petroleum geologist, gave him Sam Loyd's giant book of puzzles. He took a philosophy degree at the University of Chicago in 1936, served four years on a US Navy destroyer escort in the Atlantic during the Second World War, and later spent eight years writing for the children's magazine Humpty Dumpty, where his paper-folding puzzles opened the door to Scientific American.
The spark was a fad. In 1956 a fellow magician showed him flexagons, folded paper shapes invented by Princeton academics, and his December article on hexaflexagons set New Yorkers folding. The publisher asked whether there was enough such material for a regular feature. The first Mathematical Games column ran in January 1957, followed by almost 300 more; in 1977 the magazine moved it from the back pages to the front. He introduced wide audiences to Penrose tiles, Conway's Game of Life and the art of M. C. Escher, whom he contacted in 1961. When he retired in 1981, Douglas Hofstadter's Metamagical Themas, an anagram of his column's title, took over.
Gardner also acted as a switchboard. Correspondents including Claude Shannon and John Nash fed him ideas, and a circle later nicknamed his mathematical grapevine made connections of its own. Through him, Conway, Berlekamp and Guy met and wrote Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays, a founding text of combinatorial game theory. John Horton Conway called him the most learned man he had ever met.
His range went well beyond numbers. The Annotated Alice of 1960 became his bestseller, with over a million copies sold, and he published more than 100 books. A committed debunker, he wrote Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science in 1957 and helped found the skeptics' group CSICOP in 1976. MAGIC magazine ranked him among the century's most influential magicians. He died in Norman, Oklahoma, on 22 May 2010.
Source: Martin Gardner
