My favorite anecdote about Martin Gardner is that he originated the now famous list of “coincidences” about the lives of Abraham Lincoln and John Kennedy after his assassination. He did it deadpan in one of his early columns about “numerologist” Dr. Matrix as a way of showing how ridiculously easy it is to put together a list of similarities that have apparent deep meaning. Of course, people have taken it seriously and added to it continually over the years, making his point in the most ironic fashion.
I have all the rest of his Scientific American column books as well. They and the Isaac Asimov science columns in F&SF were my favorites as introductions to science and math.
I’m not surprised either, really… I mean, the thread title caught me by surprise, but in a “I knew it was bound to happen sooner or later” kind of way.
Absolutely—highly recommended.
I figure the average IQ of the world just went down by a couple of points.
Martin Gardner was a strong influence on me to enjoy mathematics, science and computer programming. One of the reasons I learned to code was to solve his puzzles. I wrote to him about one of my programming solutions when I in junior high and he actually wrote back a very encouraging letter. The world needs more people like him.
Don’t have anything more to add for Gardner, but will just toss in this anecdote:
There was an actor Martin Garner, who specialized in bit parts playing little Jewish old men. At one time, his entry on findagrave actually showed a photo of the still-living Martin Gardner. When I saw it, I alerted the person who had posted it, but I don’t know if my message was enough to convince them.
Like many here, I loved his “Mathematical Games” column in Scientific American. For a while, when I was a teenager in the 70s, I had a subscription. His column was the one thing I would never skip a word of.
Martin Gardner was one of my favourite people too, and I am sad to hear of his death.
My dad was a fan, and when I was a kid there were always a few Gardner books such as “Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions” around the house, which some of us kids got round to reading ourselves. My love of puzzles and recreational mathematics goes directly back to those books. They were stuffed full of intriguing notions. The Unexpected Hanging. Cantor’s intoxicating proofs of different levels of infinity. The fascinating and novel puzzles. And so on. They really were a treasure trove of ideas.
What do you mean it isn’t possible to be a similar sort of polymath today? I know lots of people whose interests are as wide as Gardner’s. They haven’t written a wide range of essays and books like he did, but that’s always going to be a rare thing. Being an extremely prolific author will always be rare, but it’s really not that difficult to be extremely varied in one’s interests.
